You Could Write For Amazon: Beginning Steps For Beginning Authors by Moore Ralph

Author:Moore, Ralph [Moore, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Straight Street Publication
Published: 2014-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

WISDOM OF FIVE RED PENS

I’ve got a problem and so do you. You can’t judge your own work fairly.

You need objective input at some point in the process because you’re either too judgmental or too tolerant.

You can beat yourself to death with a pencil because your work is so poor. Or, you might inflate your head like a party balloon, believing that you’ll make the New York Times bestseller list.

After editing my material 10 times, I ask for help. This usually comes in the form of five volunteer manuscript readers. Statistically, a higher percentage of women read books than men, so I usually ask three women and two men for their help.

Logic and Grammar

I ask my friends to look for breaks in my logic. The question I put to them is to be aware of wherever my logic looks like “A-B-D,” instead of “A-B-C-D.”

Appraising logic is the most vital gift they can offer. It’s so easy to leave out part of a story because you know it too well. You assume that the reader knows the story as well as you do—bad mistake. It’s as if a comedian told a joke but left out the segment leading into the punch line.

Another benefit from having friends look at your work is that they will correct your grammar. But you need to be careful here. You don’t want to enlist an amateur English teacher (Maybe you should even avoid the real ones). They will pulverize your personal style, safeguarding proper grammar at the expense of colorful writing.

If I ask five people to read my work, at least one of them ignores what I said about logic and offers grammatical corrections instead. I pay attention to their work but try not to let them distort my style as an author. Besides, Microsoft mostly keeps my grammar in good shape with their grammar checking utility.

One caveat here is that Dragon Naturally Speaking can slip mistakes into your work from time to time. The software may misunderstand how you pronounce a certain word. This becomes a problem if it inserts a properly spelled, grammatically correct term that confuses your reader because it isn’t what you meant to say. The “has” versus “as” illustration in the last chapter may have been a product of Dragon misunderstanding my pronunciation.

My “grammatical friends” always seem to catch one or two of these that I’ve missed. Just be careful that they don’t wash the color out of your tapestry.

It’s a good idea to insert page numbers into your manuscript before handing it to friends. Stapling pages together is also a good idea. You’ll want to remove the page numbers before working with Amazon templates because they number your pages for you. Any pagination you add would seriously gum up the template .

Numbering is crucial, when you distribute your work among readers. This is because you’ll need to interleave the (numbered) pages to link one friend’s work to another for future edits. The compiled volume of your friend’s work leads you through the next edit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.