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Last December, I had a Blurb Writing 1:1 session with Bradley Charbonneau. One of his books, Every Single Day, sold well already, but he couldn’t help but wonder whether it could do even better.

As it turns out, it could. Looking at the numbers, Bradley was able to see a real uptick since he replaced his old blurb with the one we came up with together.

Admittedly, he started playing around with pricing soon after that, which makes it hard to truly estimate how much better the book has been selling just because of our revision. Generally, though, he did sell far more copies since we last talked about his blurb, and the fact remains that it’s not just the blurb that sells. It’s the whole package, which includes a great cover and blurb and a price that matches the type of book it is.

Getting these three aligned properly is what will improve your book sales.

So, let’s have a look at Bradley’s original blurb to see how we arrived at the blurb that he has on Amazon today.Read More →

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Hyphens!

Love ’em or hate ’em, they do make our lives—or our reading, rather—easier. The tricky thing about hyphens is that some rules about them aren’t set in stone. They depend on preference and that means our usage in those cases change over time.

These days, hyphens aren’t used as much, which leads to a lot of confusion. When do you use a hyphen and when not?

Luckily, some basic rules still exist, especially when it comes to the use of compound adjectives and numbers and fractions. In other cases, the most important rules to adhere to are:

  • Consult and stick with one particular dictionary, whether an online or offline one. (Don’t use both the online and offline version of one dictionary. Really try stick to one version and one version alone.)
  • Be consistent.

Compound nouns

Today, a lot of compound words are no longer spelled with a hyphen (we write website rather than web-site, and writing paper rather than writing-paper).Read More →

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Blurb writing stinks.

There, I said it. It’s hard. It makes us miserable.

And yet it’s so incredibly important to get it right.

I recently launched a new service, Blurb Writing 1:1, to help authors with this vital bit of writing.

Mustang Rabbit, YA fantasy author and one of my clients, has kindly allowed me to share the result of a session we had about the blurb of Adelaide and the Dragon Castle, a novel to be published on the 31st of March.

A little behind the scenes might just give you the pointers you need to write a good blurb yourself.

Here goes.Read More →

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Hiring an editor seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? You wrote some words, and now you need a professional to tell you what needs fixing.

You open a new tab, type in ‘Editor needed’, and hit ‘enter’. And that’s when it hits you.

  • There are an awful lot of editors out there,
  • who offer an awful lot of different things,
  • for wildly different rates.

I won’t go into the third one today, but the first two are partly related. One of the reasons there are an awful lot of editors out there is because editing is an umbrella term for different kinds and levels of editing.

That, however, is not what makes the process complicated. So, what does?Read More →

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Let’s talk dialogue tags!

This has to be one of the most discussed topics when talking about the craft, and not everyone agrees on the dos and don’ts. But, as an editor, it’s clear to me that not everyone is up to speed. I set out to list everything I know about dialogue tags and then I found this great article that basically sums up what I was going to say 😉 Instead of inventing the wheel, I’ll just quote the article’s summary and give you the link if you want to read the rest. It’s a really good article with lots of examples.Read More →