A guest post from Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers
Suzanne Lieurance is helping me celebrate the release of the second edition of my Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips for Writers, a slim book from my HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers.
Her generosity made me think about the new era of publishing we have watched change in the last couple decades as it was nudged, pushed and, indeed, is being sculpted by the Age of the Internet.
Like many of today’s authors, I see these changes through special lenses ground in the time when publishing was out of reach of most and those who resisted their traditions were called—almost always disdainfully—“vanity publishers.”
Those days are almost gone; big publishers themselves have come to use the same tools that brought the entire industry into this new age for convenience and profitability.
For authors this is the best of times—and the worst of times.
We now have more control over our careers.
Not so long ago, many who loved writing didn’t pursue it for lack of hope, Publish-on-demand took us out of realm of fearing the process literally allowing us to become authors.
Some didn’t avoid writing.
Instead they wrote silently and secretly out of love but wouldn’t—or couldn’t–share their love.
I can’t decide which I hated more, but the day for having limited and destructive choices is dead.
Today it’s up to us to choose publishing (or not) and use it any way we prefer—privately or to pursue dreams of sharing with the world.
Here is how the New Age of Publishing affects us authors:
1. We must know much more than we did back in the days when a small team including agent, publisher, and a glorious marketing department held out hands during the publishing process.
2. Today, no matter how we choose to publish, we are better off if we know processes we once were hardly aware of: MSNBC has a motto, “The More You Know….” I like to say, “The more you know, the more you know what you can get away with.” That is, the easier it is to do our own thing.
3. That “get-away-with” proposition means freedom. With freedom comes choice. With freedom comes responsibility. We don’t want our bad choices to tarnish our prospects—or to destroy them.
How do we as authors know how to make the choices?
Which rule-breaking will feel good for us in the moment and be disastrous for us if we want to move ahead with our careers?
The oldies are still around.
Writers’ conferences are usually expensive, but they are better than ever.
I mean, I remember when there were no conferences that offered book marketing.
It was so-never-needed that we came to think it beneath our creative selves to worry about the idea that our creative efforts might be both a product and commercial.
We were often either oblivious to the idea that marketing is an integral part of publishing or we assumed we would never have to the dirty work of selling it.
Or that the marketing process might call on us for new writing skills we had never heard of before.
Of course, even in the old days we could turn to books.
Relatively inexpensive learning tools they were!
And still are.
But books on marketing didn’t cover that rare and odd little industry known as publishing.
I remember, because I couldn’t find one when I first started teaching a class at UCLA on marketing our own books.
Books on technique?
Some really great ones, but they were pretty….mmmm….unyielding about their precious rules.
Few broke rules and got away with it.
Faulkner. James Joyce.
But most writers were unaware of a term called “Style Choice.”
Strunk et. al. made us believe that everything was written in stone even though his book’s title had the word “style” in it.
And stuff like book cover design?
Interior design?
Indexing?
Formatting?
Well, we still might choose to hire that done when we’re going it on our own, but we’lll be better at hiring the best person for our project and at partnering with that person.
Or, yes, delving into it completely on their own.
Or choosing which to do on our own and which to farm out.
And that brings me to just one of the books in my HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers.
The Frugal Editor, which happens to be the award-winningest book in the series that covers some things editors never dreamt they’d need to know.
Like a few shortcuts in Word that will save an author tons of time in setting up the interior of their book.
I’m not kidding.
In Word!
Like “Style Choice” mentioned before and how to know which are rules and which are…well, truly choices.
That goes for grammar, too.
And punctuation.
So, thankfully, the authors of our new era loved my book.
And the era kept changing.
And there was too much related to editing I wanted to share, too much to fit into one book.
That means I can keep finding material to help your career and keep myself joyfully writing for a long, long time.
Besides, we had some new needs, needs many how-to authors haven’t figured out.
Most of us were tired of books we called texts.
We wanted something that told us the good, the bad and the indifferent.
And how to make the bad better.
And what we might choose to avoid at all costs.
And when it came to stuff that just goes on and on and on…like homonyms.
And we didn’t mind if we got a little humor with it.
One of my friends and former UCLA students wrote a book called Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies that convinced me we were onto a new trend.
If I wanted to help a lot of people become published authors, I’d better forget books that read like our high school texts.
In the end The Frugal Editor is a darn good beginning, but no one was likely to snuggle up with a book the size of the library dictionary my grandfather once brought home from the school library when it was considered outdated.
It was more than a foot tall!
And that brings me to the slim books in my series—only two of them so far.
The first was an addendum to The Frugal Editor, full of word trippers, a playful approach to the dastardly things that can embarrass us if we accidentally mistype one of those we learned in the third grade or so or one that we see so rarely we wouldn’t know we’d made a booboo.
I chose the ones I most often see my editing clients make for The Frugal Editor, but it wasn’t enough.
That brought me to Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips for Writers (Penguin).
It was just a digestible little booklet a writer could have some fun with but would do them some good in small doses.
An author friend, Betty Jo Tucker, said it saved her from publishing a poem where she had chosen the wrong insure/ensure just before she published one of her poems online..
Now that same little book with a few additions and quite a bit more on my beloved “Style Choices” was released in its second edition by Modern History Press.
It’s part of the new era.
New learning in small doses for busy authors.
New career-building information that’s fun.
Small books that fit into your purse or glove compartment or e-reader.
In this new publishing era, you will never run out of new things to learn about the profession you have chosen.
You can have more fun learning what you need to know.
We have choices how we take on everything from how to write book proposals (another of my booklets!) to query letters with little humor here.
A few fun choices there.
The more we know, the more assertive we can be about defying restraints.
The more confident we can be about taking the road less traveled when we choose to do so.
About Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a multi award-winning novelist and poet who applied her experience as a journalist, publicist, and retailer to the marketing of her work. When she saw that other authors often didn’t have that kind of experience to help them shoot their books to the stars, she wrote the first book in Her HowToDoItFrugally series of book, The Frugal Book Promoter (http://bit.ly/FrugalBookPromoIII) and the rest is history. Learn more about that flagship book and the newly released second edition of Great Little Last-Minute Edits for Writers at www.HowToDoItFrugally.com or just go straight to Amazon to check it out at http://bit.ly/LastMinuteEditsII .
****************************
Don’t forget to join our mailing list.
Just fill in your name and email address, below:
Carolyn, this is a wonderful post. Writers have certainly been given a lot of freedom in this new era of publishing. I love your frugal series for this reason. They’re easy to read and jammed-pack with information every writer needs.
Really, Suzanne. I’ve been here before. But never as touched as this time. Thank you for your beautiful book-cover-for-an-essay. And, whatever you do you must tell me how to get your Sea Glass Calendar for 2021. I’ll send you an image to use–one my husband loves above all of the 53 years of taking pictures I’ve had with him–of me in Mexico at a turtle preserve. Hurry! Get it done. I need to buy quite a few for friends. Making my list! (-:
Many thanks and hugs,
Carolyn