Adverbs and Adjectives are NOT Your Friends

Okay, maybe they are friends, but let’s agree to classify them as the kind of friends you invite to your house and after a half-hour spend the rest of the night hatching different plans to get them to leave. Seriously. Too many writers, particularly when starting out, think that the more they sprinkle their prose […]

 

All For One, One For All: Not Just A Cliché

My first non-fiction book on writing is blog-touring for a couple of weeks, so I felt it was fitting to also post said blog here, in my own personal space, exactly as (hopefully) printed on the other sites. I hope you writers out there read this. I wrote this book for YOU. I don’t know […]

 

Word Count, In A Word? Worthless.

As most of you know from previous posts, comments I’ve made, and for the mind-readers out there, that I believe the faithful old writer’s term “word count” is about as useful to the quality of a book as is the words “pigeon shit”. Now pardon my New York Central Park language, but what in the […]

 

Call T.O.D. On KDP Select And Smash The Words.

When I first began this digital publishing journey in 2011, I used Smashwords founder Mark Coker’s Smashwords Style Guide (which is free, BTW) as my bible to format an eBook, even though I was mostly planning on selling books on Amazon. At the time, Amazon had a true lion’s share of the market (something like […]

 

Need An Editor To Make Your Book Better?

On March 4, 2013, in (or...), Editing, Interviews, Mea Culpa, Proofreading, by rsguthrie

A couple weeks ago I introduced and interviewed my editor, Russell Rowland, to unleash my secret on the world. Turns out his email address has not been working and has been forwarding all his mail to the Almighty Internet Bit Bucket (or, who knows, maybe to Linus’s pumpkin patch in a misdirected hope that the […]

 

Show Me A Totally Clean Manuscript (Sans Deals With The Devil)

On August 1, 2012, in Editing, Humor, Indie Authors, Parody, by rsguthrie

I don’t get it. I really don’t. How does anyone produce a spotless manuscript? I can’t tell you how many times my latest manuscript was proofread. By myself, at least a hundred times, but I understand why I can’t see the typos. I know what it’s supposed to say, so I am the worst one […]