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This Day, Thursday, September 24, 2009, in Fastball!
Thursday
Sep 24, 2009
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Let us now praise editors — Martin
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An older piece by Gary Kamiya, which I noticed on clusterflock today.
The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.
If Antonio Stradivari had an editor, he certainly didn’t give them a signature line inside his violins.
I think editing is a noble, and necessary art. Used to be that designers hired typesetters to lay out their type correctly. To worry over the punctuation and spacing, the ligatures and em-or-en dash decisions. Now designers are responsible for this as the typesetters of the computer age.
So too must writers become editors, or at least better editors. They must be self-reliant. Design has both suffered and exploded with new creativity over the loss of typographers, so too will writing suffer and explode with the loss of editors.
Who, it should be pointed out, have every opportunity to explain to writers their value, and why a self-publishing small business person who is making their way as a writer should hire an editor to work on their texts.
Thursday
Sep 24, 2009
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The No. 1 Mistake Self-Publishishers Make — Martin
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Looks like the tide is turning on the opinion of self-publishing online. Here’s a post by Maria Schneider, former Editor-in-Chief of Writer’s Digest, arguing that you might want to forgo hard-copy publishing and put your work online. The goal is to build an audience so that you’ll be more salable to a publisher.
If you have a platform — a blog with a big following, regular speaking engagements, a known expertise — trust me, you won’t have to go looking for publishers. They’ll find you.
Ms. Schneider, like many of the people I link to here, are still working inside the traditional publishing system, so their advice is geared at becoming (that most elevated of writerly goals) “A Published Author.”
In this case, her advice makes sense and is essentially “leverage the following you’ve built up to get published.”
I argue still that a time is coming where there will be other revenue streams and possibilities for writers than going for the big sell. That time is coming faster and faster, the cheaper and better digital readers become. When the best, easiest, and potentially most profitable way of leveraging that following is to do it by yourself.
But I think she has one very good thrust to this article, and especially in a some of her follow-up comments with readers:
If you were to publish hard copies, who would you sell them to? Do you have a marketing plan?
In other words, if you want to do it yourself, know what you’re doing. Asking a successful writer to be a good editor, publisher and designer is going to be the bare minimum of success in future years.
Thursday
Sep 24, 2009
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HOW TO: Write a Novel Using the Web — Martin
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Mashable.com article by Josh Catone on organizing, writing and publishing your novel using only online tools.
