A helpful, reassuring guide to putting together a publishing team.
Authors who self-publish should hire freelance editors, designers, and consultants to spruce up their books, according to this primer.
Neighbour, a book editor and ghost writer, warns readers that every manuscript requires much specialized effort to turn it into a readable, marketable work and offers expert advice on finding reliable professionals who can do it. These include experienced editors who will use a coldly objective eye to diagnose the inevitable flaws that authors cannot perceive in their own work and fix everything from a manuscript’s overall argument and tone to the placement of commas and dashes; designers who can craft eye-catching, genre-appropriate art and choose fonts for the cover; and interior designers who sweat the myriad tiny but crucial details of page layout, from picking the right margin size to avoiding unsightly “rivers” of space between words. In addition, a writer needs a book shepherd—the author has been called one—who can coordinate all of the above and also oversee a volume’s printing, distribution, and marketing to the “reader persona” who is the likeliest audience. Neighbour packs her slender, no-nonsense manual with lots of useful lore on everything from arcane publishing jargon to professional associations that keep databases of working editors and designers, and she provides a trove of practical tips for vetting prospective freelancers. (Among the questions she suggests for interviewing editors are “Do you offer free editing of sample pages, so I can see how we might work together?” and “How would you handle numbers in my manuscript?”) The author’s brisk, lucid prose is lit by tart humor (a professional cover designer is not “a family member who has never taken a design or composition course”) and, alas, marred by at least one typo that her own editor overlooked (a period missing at the end of the sentence “Self-publishing doesn’t mean you have to do everything on your own”). Authors who are serious about making a mark with their books will find a wealth of information and insights here.
A helpful, reassuring guide to putting together a publishing team.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9962541-5-1
Page Count: 107
Publisher: Upriver, Downriver Books
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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