5 Reasons I Say “No Thank You”

I’ve been powering through submissions this weekend, and I decided to do another list in hopes of helping future submitting authors understand what makes a submission an almost instantaneous no. Some of these are probably universal nos, some of them may be just my own quirks. Most of these authors will receive a form letter on Monday morning instead of whatever feedback I can usually find time to provide.

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Getting the most out of your typesetting professional

If you hire someone to typeset your work, the easier you make the job, the happier your typesetter will be. If you take a few extra minutes to be sure you’ve given the typesetter all the information he or she will need, you’ll find that many typesetters will welcome more work from you, and may give you a discount (I certainly would), on the work you request.*

This is the basic progression of events: You send the typesetter your manuscript, describe your trim size, and let the typesetter know if your printer accepts spreads or single pages. If your printer will print spreads, that means the interior margin can be wider than the exterior margin, making it easier to read the book when it’s open without sacrificing too much space on the outside margin. If your printer only accepts singles, the margins must be the same size on both the left and the right.

Your typesetter sets up the master(s) in InDesign (or some other layout software. Layout can be done in Word or Open Office, but the fine-grained controls aren’t there and it’s much harder to get a truly professional look.) The master is the design template. Depending on the type of manuscript, there may be two or many more masters. For an anthology where the authors’ names and titles have to appear on each page of each individual story, there are often twice as many masters as there are authors/stories.
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Author, Author!

Think about the last book you picked up. Chances are, somewhere on the front of it, especially if the author was relatively unknown, someone famous wrote something nice about the story you were holding in your hand.

“Brilliant! The next great American Vampire novel!” Famous Author

After you dismiss the rumor about how Famous Author is paid to do that, shed the bad advice you’ve most likely read somewhere. That is, “You should never pay for a blurb.”

How in heaven’s name did the unknown author get the famous author to say that? It would mean the famous author read it! (Absolutely, entirely, right now, dismiss from your mind any rumor you may have heard about how Famous Author really doesn’t read the book; he or she is just paid to say that. That’s unprofessional behavior and unlikely; a rumor probably started by those sour grapes people who can’t get a blurb.)

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Inspiration

I wear a lot of hats, so the sites that interest me fall into a variety of categories.

Website Design

Endicott Studios… Beautiful images, beautiful stories…

CSS, Design Inspiration. One of my very favorite websites to visit now and again, especially when I need inspiration, has been the CSS Zen Garden site. Since 2004, designers have been sending in beautiful designs that demonstrate the flexibility of CSS. The content of the site never changes, only the way it looks, from a movie theater to a garden, a sci-fi thriller theme to a daguerreotype. The brain behind CSS Zen Garden, Dave Shea, wrote a book about the beauty of CSS that’s pretty important reading for anyone who wants to design beautiful websites that people can actually use. As of this writing, CSS Zen Garden is down, but I hope it comes back. Dave Shea thinks it’s still relevant and so do I. (more…)