The other day I was asked to make a short presentation for the Arizona Book Publishers Association. I chose to address a few issues that authors can do to simplify their own lives and ours when preparing manuscripts.

This was pretty easy to do, since we had been wrestling with a particularly difficult book compiled by a group of authors for publication through a print-on-demand house. The book was to be used adjunct to their business, and so it was to their advantage to self-publish rather than to go through a traditional press. Just as well: no one who wasn’t being paid to publish the thing would have accepted it.

The copy epitomized six major traits of amateurishly prepared material. It was filled with authorly misdeeds that create unnecessary headaches for editors and layout artists. These matters ultimately cost the authors a great deal more money than anyone needs to pay for production of a book: many of our sixty-dollar hours were consumed needlessly in untangling messes the authors could have and should have done right from the outset.

So, let us discuss. Let us discuss serially, starting today with Installment 1.

1. When working with a coauthor…

Please work together with your coauthor!

Apparently these authors rarely spoke to each other. After I’d plodded through the first few chapters, I opened chapter 4 to find three introductory paragraphs identical, word for word, with the first few paragraphs of chapter 2. As it that weren’t enough, the same thing happened in two other chapters. Hello? Is anyone there?

Use the same style manual!

A “style manual” is a publication guide that codifies such things as the way citation and documentation should be done, whether numbers should be spelled out or set as numerals, how tables are set up, and the like. Here are some examples:

The University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style. 15^th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

 Joseph Gibaldi. MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3rd edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008.

 Joseph Gibaldi. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7^th edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, forthcoming in 2009.

Norm Goldstein. The Associated Press Stylebook. 43^rd edition. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

American Psychological Association. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 5^th edition. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001.

Council of Science Editors. Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers. 7^th edition. Reston, Va.: Council of Science Editors and Rockefeller University Press, 2006.

American Medical Association: The American Medical Association Manual of Style. 9^th edition. Baltimore: Wilkins & Wilkins, 1998.

 The Chicago Manual is the standard of the book publishing industry.  If you want to write books, you should own a copy.  There are some other, more specialized style manuals. Consult with your publisher for advice on which one to use. Whichever is selected, please read it and follow it closely! When coauthors are working together, each author must follow the agreed-upon manual’s style. Otherwise, a confusing jumble results.

If you’re self-publishing, please let your editor know which manual you think you’re using.

Please use the same style sheet.

A style sheet is an informal list of the individual quirks in a manuscript. It ensures regularity in such matters as unusual spelling or hyphenation, use of numbers vs. numerals, and the way you type your heads and subheads.

Coauthors should agree an how heads and subheads will look (boldface caps and lower-case flush left? boldface italic caps and lower-case centered? italic caps and lower-case run-in?). Subheadings come in several levels: level A, level B, level C, and so on.

The level-A heading is usually a chapter title, like this:

9. The Key to the Pacific Coast Order of Flying Ground Squirrels

Your level-B heading then would be a subhead:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris dapibus. Phasellus facilisis neque quis eros. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

This Is a Level-B Subhead

Donec semper nunc a nisl. Vivamus porta pulvinar felis. Cras lacus. Vivamus tincidunt egestas ipsum. Vivamus erat nisl, condimentum eget, gravida a, pulvinar at, tellus.

The next level of subhead should be typographically distinct from the higher level of subheads. Think levels in a topic outline: the sub-subhead would be a subtopic if you outlined your manuscript.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris dapibus. Phasellus facilisis neque quis eros. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

This Is a Level-C Subhead

Donec semper nunc a nisl. Vivamus porta pulvinar felis. Cras lacus. Vivamus tincidunt egestas ipsum. Vivamus erat nisl, condimentum eget, gravida a, pulvinar at, tellus. 

It’s best to avoid complicated sub-sub-subheads, but if you need to use them, the next level should look different from either of the higher levels.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris dapibus. Phasellus facilisis neque quis eros. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

This Is a Level-D Subhead.  Donec semper nunc a nisl. Vivamus porta pulvinar felis. Cras lacus. Vivamus tincidunt egestas ipsum. Vivamus erat nisl, condimentum eget, gravida a, pulvinar at, tellus.

The choice of fonts and faces is not cast in stone. However, they must be consistent. An editor can’t read your mind, and a layout artist won’t even try to read your mind. When you’re working with one or more coauthors, you should be sure everyone on the writing team knows and will use the desired format for heads and subheads.

Avoid redundancy. Please don’t repeat each other!

One member of the authorial team should accept the job of reading all the copy, from beginning to end. With the agreed-upon style sheet in hand, this person should be sure

a. that everything the team intended to say in the book is included;
b. that the format for everything is consistent (heads and subheads, documentation and citation, tables, figures, paragraphing style, spelling, numbers & numerals, etc.); and
c.  that no passages or concepts have been repeated.

Attention to these few simple matters can save a great deal of time when you reach a stage where time is money. That stage begins the minute a manuscript is handed over to an editor or a graphic artist.

In our last post, I began a series called Saving Time and Money at the Manuscript Stage, mostly meant for self-publishing authors and for operators of small presses. Today I’d like to mention a few things you can do as you are entering copy into your word processor—or, if you’re a publisher, some basic word processing guidelines that you can and should require your authors to follow.

For authors, each of these hints will help make your manuscript look more professional, which will help immensely in your effort to find a publisher. No editor wants to work with a rank amateur, and so if the initial impression your manuscript creates is amateurish, it may work against acceptance of an otherwise publishable work. If you are self-publishing, these devices will save you money. For publishers and packagers, encouraging your authors to adhere to these simple rules will save you hours of unnecessary work and frustration and many dollars in editors’ and graphic artists’ time. So…listen up!

Please double-space throughout!

This means everything. All parts of the manuscript should be double-spaced!

• The table of contents should be double-spaced.
• Heads and subheads should be double-spaced.
• Indented block quotations should be double-spaced.
• Tables should be double-spaced.
• Footnotes and endnotes should be double-spaced.
• The bibliography (reference list) should be double-spaced.
• Appendices should be double-spaced.
• The index should be double-spaced.

Everything. All of it. Double-spaced.

Yes, dear author. I know it’s digital copy on a computer and that the copyeditor can hit Ctrl-A Format > Paragraph > Line spacing > double. But why should she have to do that when you should have done it in the first place? And why should she have to undo the messes that this can make in copy whose author has played with the keyboard like a Tinker-Toy set to build all sorts of outlandish DIY constructions?

Remember, your final printed book will look different from the way it appears on an 8 x 11 1/2-inch page. All your careful layout will go away when it is poured into a page layout program and resized to fit the pages of your publisher’s book. The editor and the page layout artist can best work with plain vanilla double-spaced copy, and in some instances must have it formatted that way.  Save these worthies some headaches and yourself a lot of grief and hassle, and just double-space everything.

Refrain from entering an extra space between paragraphs.

It’s OK to indicate the start of a new paragraph by entering a hard tab at the start of the first line of each new paragraph. If that seems like too much work, it’s OK to let your word processor automatically indent each first line. But please. do. not.  double-space between grafs.

Use the same font size throughout.

It’s OK to set the chapter titles a little larger, if that makes you feel good. But please set all the subheads and sub-subheads in the same font size as the rest of the copy.  Distinguish between levels of heads and subheads by using (consistently!) boldface and italic.

Do not use reduced type for indented block quotes. Do not use reduced type for footnotes and reference lists.

Select a standard, widely used font such as Times, Times New Roman, or Garamond, and use 12-point type for all of the body copy, heads and subheads.

Thank you.

Please use your word processor’s automatic functions to create hanging indented paragraphs and block indents!

Do not under any circumstances construct DIY hanging indents and block indents with the “enter” and the “tab” keys. This trick creates a huge mess for someone else to clean up.

In Word, the hanging indent function is at Format > Paragraph > Special > hanging. The block indent function can be engaged by clicking on the “increase indent” icon: it looks like a little page with a couple of lines indented next to a right-pointing arrow. Unengage this function by clicking on the “decrease indent” icon. If you can’t find these icons at the top of your screen, then go to Format > Paragraph  and see the choices under “Indentation.” Selecting “Right” allows you to indent copy in 1/10 of an inch increments (.5 is pretty standard); selecting “Left” allows you to move back to the margin (enter 0 to do that].

Sometimes when you copy and paste passages from the Internet, your word processor will format them with hard returns and tab indents. Please delete these, so that the copy wraps normally. In Word, you can tell whether this is happening by clicking on the little icon that looks like a ¶ sign. When this toggle switch is clicked on, it shows each blank space with a little raised dot (·), each hard return (where someone has pressed the “enter” key) as a ¶ symbol, and each hard tab as a little right-pointing arrow (→). So, an incorrectly formatted hanging indent (for example) will look like this:

Lorem·ipsum·dolor·sit·amet,·consectetur· ¶
 → adipiscing·elit.·Curabitur·porta,·leo·eu·¶
 → scelerisque·volutpat,·diam·diam·¶ 
 → condimentum·dui,·ut·ultrices·risus.·.·.·.¶ 

If you find this in something you have pasted into your MS, or if (God forfend) you have done it yourself, please go through and delete each hard return and each hard tab space. Once the copy wraps normally, please format the material using your word-processor’s hanging indent (or, as appropriate) block indent function.

Please type one space ONLY, not two spaces, after periods, colons, exclamation points, and question marks!

If you are of a certain age, you learned in typing class to hit period-space-space at the end of every sentence. And that is correct if you’re using a typewriter.

It’s not correct when you’re setting type for print. And when you are using a word processor, you are performing the first stage in setting type for print. Remember: a word processor is not a typewriter!

The reason for the difference is that in the font used by typewriters (usually Courier or Elite), each character is the same width. An i is the same width as an m. But in grown-up fonts, character widths differ:

iiiii
mmmmm

With a typewriter’s uniform-width characters, entering two spaces after punctuation eases the eye and makes it easier to distinguish a new sentence. Try that in typeset copy, though, and you’re apt to get “rivers of white”: meandering vertical stripes of white space. It looks funny. Typeset copy has never been set with two spaces after every period.

So: either get used to hitting the space bar once after punctuation or learn to eliminate extraneous spaces with a search-&-replace function. In Word, this very easy:

Edit > Replace (on a PC, the keyboard command is alt-e-e)
Next to Find what, press the space bar twice, entering two blank spaces.
Next to Replace with, press the space bar once, entering one blank space.
Now click Replace all (the PC’s keyboard command is alt-a).

This will replace all the double-blank-spaces with single blank spaces. Click Replace all until Word tells you it has completed the search and made 0 replacements; because some people use the space bar with great enthusiasm, it may take more than one search to get rid of all the extraneous spaces.

When indicating a long (one-em) dash, use the same symbol consistently, throughout the manuscript.

The long dash is called an “em-dash” because it is approximately the same width as a letter m in a scalable font.

There are other dashes. The shorter “en-dash,” for example, is about the width of a letter n. A hyphen is shorter still. A minus sign is about the size of an en-dash; although the two are not the same, many typesetters use the en-dash to signify subtraction.

i
-    hyphen

n
–   en-dash

m
—  em-dash

En-dashes are most commonly used in inclusive numbers:

1966–67, not 1966-67

Most recent versions of Word default to create an em-dash when you type two hyphens with no space between the characters on either side. WordPress defaults to convert two hyphens to an en-dash (who knows why?), and so to illustrate this I’ll have to substitute en-dashes.

Lorem ipsum––dolor sit amet becomes Lorem ipsum—dolor sit amet 

In newer versions of Word, typing a single hyphen with a space between the characters on either side morphs to a word, a space, a one-en dash, a space, and a word. This is British style:

Lorem ipsum - dolor sit amet becomes Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum – dolor sit amet

Any one of these typing quirks is fairly easy for an editor or typesetter to replace globally. But please. Use the same set of keystrokes to indicate a one-em dash. Whatever makes you happy, do it consistently throughout the manuscript! Having to replace two, three, four combinations that some author has dreamed up gets to be very old, very fast.

Why do these arcane issues matter?

Because, dear author, dear publisher: they cost you money!

If you are an author who is self-publishing a book, you will hire an editor and a typesetter to help put your magnum opus into a form acceptable for marketing. Editors and typesetters have specialized skills that ordinarily sell for around $60 an hour. Do you really want to pay $60 an hour (or more…sometimes much more) to have someone retype your manuscript? This is something you can and should do yourself.

If you are going through a print-on-demand publisher, trust me: you pay for editing and typesetting. Decent POD publishers subcontract their customers’ books to book packagers, who sub-subcontract the editing and typesetting to editors and graphic designers. If an editor has to waste untold hours to fix your typing, that cost will be reflected in the amount you pay the POD company.

And if you are a publisher, of course you would like to maximize your profits. Having to pay editing and design rates for low-level tasks that amount to typing naturally will cut in to your profit margin.

Get the word processing right from the get-go. Save time—your own or someone else’s—and save money.

This is the third installment in a series of posts suggesting ways authors and small publishers can save headaches, time, and money at the manuscript stage. We’ve already talked about working with coauthors, using standard style manuals, and processing words like a pro. Now let’s discuss…

Images, Tables, and Textboxes

Please. Please, please, please DON’T embed these in the manuscript!

Tables, images, and textboxes do not just pop into InDesign or Quark. The graphic artist needs to place them, one by one, into the layout in the appropriate places.

If that’s not a good enough reason for you, here’s what happened when one author got fancy with tables:

At 1:30 one morning, I finally finished a perfectly awful amateur manuscript produced by one of my clients. Eager to get the work, when I quoted my page rate I hadn’t looked carefully at his “tables,” most of which were jury-rigged with tabs and hard returns, nor had I realized that half the copy consisted of these fake tables, because he hadn’t numbered them. The manuscript contained a good two dozen of them. One actually had been created in Word’s table function, but then somehow he’d embedded a graphic inside the table. Another was a table stuck inside a textbox, which I could not remove from the copy no matter how hard I tried. A third was a table over which the author had superimposed a text box, apparently unaware that he could merge cells to create a space in which to enter the paragraph he stuck there. 

Because he was trying to do the page layout himself in Word—this document was a book accompanying a course in personal finance he was peddling, and he intended to have it printed at a KwikCopy—I converted his tab-and-return monstrosities into tables, cleaned up the real tables, and left them embedded in the edited file.

What a mess! It took hours and hours and HOURS to untangle, and by the time I finished, the $4.50/page quote I’d given him stuck me with an hourly rate of about three bucks. Finally, on the fourth night that I’d spent working until I couldn’t hold my eyes open another minute, I was about to wrap the job up…and Word hung. I managed to save the file and shut down the computer, and then I stumbled off to bed.

The next morning when I opened it to add a few finishing touches before sending it and my puny bill to the author, what should come up but an error message: “A table in this document has become corrupted. To recover the contents of the table: select the table and choose Convert Table to Text from the Table menu.” (This strategy, BTW, converts your table, all right: into scrambled eggs!)

This problem was a known issue in MS Word 2002. I was using Word 2004 and so never had encountered it until his Word 2002 file came along. Nothing I tried would recover the file. Days of eye-glazing work had been lost. I did not get paid for my time and labor, and my client did not get his edited copy. 

This was a direct result of embedding large numbers of complex tables in a Word file. 

The solution is to create the tables in a separate word file—one file per table, preferably, each given an identifiable filename, such as “table 1.doc” or “Jones table 1.doc.” Format the table according to Chicago style (or whatever style you’re following) and give it a title. Here’s an example.

In the MS where you want the file to appear, enter a call-out to the layout artist, like this:

<COMP: Please insert Table 1 here>

You can boldface or highlight them as you like; the compositor (layout artist) will use the layout program’s search function to look for a symbol such as < to find them all, and so is unlikely to miss any. Where she or he finds a callout, she will place the appropriate table in the layout, using InDesign or Quark.

Do the same for material you would like to place in textboxes.

Do not, do not, do NOT stick textboxes in a Word document and then drop it on a layout artist! This creates headaches of migraine caliber. Just because Word will do something does not mean you should do it!

For textboxes, you can use a single file. Call it something like textboxes.doc, Jones texboxes.doc, or chapt 1 textboxes.doc. Do not place the copy inside textboxes in this file. Just type it, and number each blurb in the order in which you would like it to appear.

Textbox 1

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam nunc. Donec consectetur ipsum nec est. Quisque at dolor. 

Textbox 2

Nunc luctus risus in tortor. Vivamus tristique, lectus a pretium aliquet, felis mi lacinia erat, sagittis rhoncus metus arcu accumsan ligula. 

 Indicate in the copy approximately where you would like to place the textbox:

<COMP: Please place textbox 1 near here.>

Remember that unless you’re publishing in 8.5 x 11-inch format, the page size for your published document will be different from Word’s default page size. In any event, because the layout program’s font size and margins will be different, what you type in Word will not look identical when it’s laid out. So all your effort to trick out pages using Word’s bells and whistles will be just so much wasted time and energy.

Images and graphs need to be saved as JPEGS or PDFs, and absolutely positively NOT embedded in Word files! An embedded image is useless to a layout artist. These are not print-quality images, and they do not flow into page layout programs in any sane manner. 

Handling images and graphs entails three steps:

1. Save the file as a JPEG or a PDF.
2. Write a caption and save it (with all the other captions) in a separate Word file.
3. Type a callout in the manuscript to tell the layout artist where you would like to place the image.

Give your JPEG an identifying name, numbered in the order in which it should appear. Images are called “figures.” Thus:

Figure 1.jpg
Jones Figure 1.jpg
Jones Chapt 1 Fig 1.jpg
Jones Fig 1.pdf

And thus: 

Nunc luctus risus in tortor. Vivamus tristique, lectus a pretium aliquet, felis mi lacinia erat, sagittis rhoncus metus arcu accumsan ligula. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Curabitur commodo purus. Nam varius. Aenean id sem quis sem porttitor adipiscing. Suspendisse tempor elit ac mi.

<COMP: Please place Figure 1 near here.>

Aliquam scelerisque lacus placerat purus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Quisque arcu. Vestibulum sit amet lorem. Nunc enim velit, placerat nec, fringilla vitae, elementum ac, arcu. Fusce mattis. Donec sodales. Donec augue tortor, pretium eu, posuere quis, volutpat non, nunc. Nullam varius dignissim nisl. Vivamus lobortis. 

<COMP: Please place Figure 2 near here.>

Type all the captions in a separate file, in the order in which the images should appear, and clearly identify them:

Figure 1

Little League players at a public park in Cincinnati, 1951.

Figure 2

Like their big-league counterparts, Pop Warner teams had mascots, among them the Erewhon Lumberjacks’ Musky the Muskrat.

What You’ll Give the Publisher or Layout Artist:

So. When you finish compiling a manuscript that includes tables, pullouts (textboxes), and images, you’ll hand over a package for the layout artist that contains the following items:

The manuscript
Files containing the tables and their titles
Images and graphs formatted as JPEGs or PDFs
A file containing captions for the images and graphs.

This seems like a lot of trouble, eh? Well…trust me. It’s a LOT less trouble than a single Word file with all that stuff jumbled up in it. When someone else has to untangle the mess, the process is time-consuming and expensive (you, dear author, ultimately will pay for the time required), and the potential for error is hugely magnified. 

Do it right the first time. Please.

While the Copyeditor’s Desk was down for a few days, a contract from our best client came in. They wanted us to sign a master contract that would govern our relationship in 2009.

At first glance, the contract looked OK. But as I was reading over the three pages of boilerplate, what should I come across but an indemnity clause. These little zingers are common in publishing: it’s a device to transfer the cost of any and all legal action or arbitration from the publishing company to the writer (or, in our case, the editors)—the very parties in the relationship who are least able to bear such expenses.

Usually you’ll see the word “indemnify” in the language. It’s a red flag: any time that word shows up, you should stop right there. This passage, however, was more subtle:

15. ATTORNEY’S FEES: Should Contractor not abide by the terms and conditions set  forth in this Agreement and it becomes necessary for the Company to engage the services of an attorney or mediator to resolve any such dispute, Contractor agrees to pay all Company costs associated with this action, including, but not limited to, attorney, mediator, and process server fees. All legal action will be initiated in a Maricopa County, Arizona court.

This is exactly what “indemnify” means: to pay the costs for someone else.   

We do not sign contracts like this. It’s far better to forego the work than to end up being rendered penniless by lawyers’ and court fees, regardless of whether you’re at fault. You understand, the language above says that even if a court finds in your favor, you still will have to pay the client’s legal fees, just because they decided to take some action against you.

Many magazine contracts now contain similar clauses. Do not ever sign such a thing!

When I was writing on a freelance basis for magazines and newspapers, I would take a black marker and ink these clauses out. This, however, is risky, because to make it legal, both parties have to initial the change. If your editor refuses to do so or has no authority to alter the contract, the fact that you unilaterally crossed out a paragraph may not change things.

Better to discuss the issue with the client. Often they will delete the offending clause—most of the time, they don’t expect writers to know what an indemnity clause is or to understand its implications. When you let them know you’re wise to that game, they’ll back down. If they refuse to do so, you’re better off not to do business with them. This kind of arrangement is unfair to you and puts you at enormous financial risk.

Some things are worse than not getting an assignment, and this is one of them.

I did let the client know the indemnity clause was unacceptable, and I politely explained why. Before long, I’m pleased to report, along came an answer to the effect that it was a piece of boilerplate they’d swiped off the Web. We should cross out and initial the offending paragraph and they would agree to the deletion.

That’s a relief! We didn’t want to lose the client. But on the other hand…clients are a dime a dozen; life savings are not.

Mrs. Micah, over at Finance for a Freelance Life, offers an interesting rumination on setting fees for freelance writing and technical consulting. She starts at the premise that one will charge an hourly rate and then touches on some signal issues for writers: the question of what your time is really worth and the matter of estimating how much time and energy a project will demand. 
written by vh for The Copyeditor’s Desk. © 2008     
Meanwhile, at about the same time, veteran editor Katharine O’Moore Klopf posted an article at Editor Mom that touched obliquely on the subject as she made some suggestions for where to find experienced professional editors. Take note, here, of this important statement:

In general, you won’t find the most professional or experienced editorial professionals on Elance.com [or on other sites like it, such as Guru.com], because the way Elance is set up encourages freelancers to outbid one another, to the point of lowballing. Those rates may seem reasonable to you, but they’re starvation pay for freelancers. With the rates that most projects go for on Elance, you’ll often wind up with the inexperienced newbies and the less-talented freelancers whom few other people will hire. You’ll be paying Walmart prices and expecting to get Saks Fifth Avenue work, but guess what you’ll often get instead.

Most writers and editors underestimate the value of their time and skills. It takes real talent to write well. And a editor gets to be good through broad and deep education. Each of these characteristics—talent and education—are worth a great deal, and when they’re combined in one package, they’re worth even more. No one should work for less than a living wage (the federal minimum wage, which is not a living wage, is now pegged at $6.65 an hour and slated to rise to $7.25 next July).

I’d like to address two facets of this issue: first, how to estimate what you need to earn; and second, how to get it from clients who in fact do think they should pay Walmart prices for Saks Fifth Avenue work.

Valuing Your Time

The first order of business for a freelancer in any business is to figure out how much she or he needs to earn, per hour, to cover living expenses and overhead. To begin, you need to estimate how much net income you will need to keep a roof over your head and food on your table. Elsewhere, I have figured that I would need to net a bare minimum of about $27,800 to maintain a crimped version of my present lifestyle, were I laid off (my current net from a middle-income salary is a little over $39,570). 

Starting from your projected net, you need to add the following expenses:

• Taxes (state and federal income taxes; property taxes; vehicle registration fees, etc.)
• Health insurance
• Retirement savings
• Membership in professional and trade organizations
• Computer equipment
• High-speed computer connection
• Office supplies
• Increased utility bills resulting from working at home
• Unreimbursed work-related travel
• Incorporation and other legal and accounting fees

The largest of these will be health insurance and taxes, and unfortunately, they are the two items you can’t omit from your calculations.

For me to net $27,800, I would have to gross about $34,760. 

Once you have an idea of how much you want to gross, you need to translate that to a rough hourly rate.

Let’s suppose I put in 40 billable hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Forty hours times 50 weeks gives me 2,000 billable hours; dividing 2,000 hours into $34,760 gives me a rate of $17.38 an hour.

O.K. Now let’s get real: to get a freelance business going and keep it running, you need to sell, sell, sell. A good 40% of your time will be spent on marketing and networking. A far more likely figure for billable hours is something like 20 hours a week, or 1,000 hours a year. That is, to earn $34,760, you’ll need to charge $34.76 an hour.

That represents a very modest income. If you live in a big American city, it will buy a lifestyle best described as “ascetic.” You probably will have to reside in a small town to live comfortably on such an income, especially since you will experience periods when no work comes in. This means that realistically you need to charge a much higher per-hour rate.

I aim for $60 an hour, and I’ve had clients suggest that is too low. Others suggest it’s too high, often by fainting dead away when they hear it.

At $60 an hour, if I worked 20 hours a week and gave myself a two-week vacation, I would earn $60,00 a year. My freelance activities earn nothing of the sort, of course, largely because I don’t work anything like that many hours.

Making Your Charge Palatable to Clients

Few people will pay an English major $60 to an hour, not even one with a Ph.D. The first thing that pops into their minds is that they can’t afford it. Second thing they think is that your highest and best use is teaching high-school or grade-school English for around $24,000 a year, an amount that would net you something like $9.60 an hour on a gross of $12 an hour (figured on a 12-month basis, which is how long you have to make that nine-month pay last). They think, my dears, that you have got your nerve to ask for a living wage.

So, what you  need to do is present your fee in a way that does not readily make your hourly rate clear. How? Translate it to a per-page rate.

How to Calculate a Per-Page Rate

a. For writers

To achieve that and do it fairly for you and for your client, you need to know how long it will take you accomplish one page of work. As an editor, how long will it take you to edit a page of copy? Or, if you’re a writer, how long will it take to write a page?

Obviously, this varies according to the kind of assignment you’re presented with and according to experience and expertise.

I can write and revise a 1,600-word feature article for a magazine or newspaper in two to four hours. But the writing is the easy part: to gather the material to compose such an article, I have to do a lot of research and interview a half-dozen sources. Each of those sources has to be reached on the phone or in person; this generally requires getting past a gatekeeper and then waiting for the person to return a call. It may require going to the person and spending upwards of an hour in a face-to-face interview. Assuming, optimistically, that I spend about 40  minutes tracking down and interviewing each of six subjects, that’s another 4 hours of work time right there…before I locate printed material and read it. Let’s add another 4 hours, then, for reading articles, books, and online materials. A four-hour project has now morphed into a 12-hour project, and that’s a pretty modest estimate. In fact, it’s likely to take much longer.

All of which is to say a simple magazine assignment can be expected, conservatively, to take a day and a half of work time. At $60 an hour, I should get no less than $720. Sixteen hundred words amounts to about 6.4 pages of typed copy. So, dividing 1,600 words by 6.4 pages, I should get $112.50 a page for a simple, straightforward magazine article.

Now, here’s something many beginning writers don’t know: $720 is cheap for a professionally written magazine article. I wouldn’t touch a feature assignment for less than $1,000. It’s just not worth my time to do it for less. Believe me: it will take more than 12 hours to complete.

Why don’t beginning writers know that? Because editors charge what they think they can get away with, and what they can get away with is outrageous!

Why can editors get away with taking outrageous advantage of freelance writers? Because writers don’t know what their time is worth! And because you are competing with people who write for ego gratification, not to make a living. Editors know they can find people who will do the job for the sheer joy of seeing their byline in print, and who will think a $300 fee for a $1,000 job is just pure gravy.

This is why, if you simply must try to be a freelance journalist, you should join an organization such as the American Society of Journalists and Authors, where you can learn from other writers how much they are being paid and what is considered a reasonable rate for a professional job.

It is better, IMHO, to write for businesses, where the custom of paying for value received is more widely  honored than in journalism.

Writing is hard work. That is why my rate for ghost-writing or cowriting a book-length work is $60 a typed, double-spaced page or, for writers who already have a contract, 100% of the author’s advance (minimum $20,000) plus 50% of royalties. This is based on a track record that includes four books published with prominent national presses, one of which was a best-seller. Less experienced writers might charge less, but anything below $30 a page may not pay you for your time. You should get between $10,000 and $20,000 to ghostwrite a book; at $20 a page, a 350-page manuscript would gross a mere $7,000…for what could easily be six months to a year’s worth of full-time work.

In any event, rather than citing a per-hour rate that may scare a client off, consider the nature of the assignment, estimate how long it will take to perform the assignment, multiply that amount of time by your targeted hourly wage, and add 25 to 50 percent for Murphy’s Law. This figure is the amount you should ask the client to pay for a proposed project.

Don’t ever agree to do a writing project on spec. And remember: “pay on publication” often means “pay never.”

b. For Editors

Editing is less difficult, although to do it well requires broad experience and a good education. If anything, the skills required to edit copy are more complex than those needed to write copy, especially if the copy consists of workaday newspaper, magazine, or website content. However, because one usually doesn’t have to spend hours in research and interviews, the immediate job feels less challenging. 

At The Copyeditor’s Desk, our fee schedule is based on the estimated time it takes to edit or proofread a standard double-spaced page depending on the difficulty of the copy. The amounts we quote average out to about $50 an hour, which should net the editor $25 to $30 an hour, leaving $20 to $25 an hour to cover overhead. As a practical matter, if you billed 20 hours a week, that would give you an annual gross income of $50,000, from which you would have to pay the extravagant cost of individual health insurance and self-employed FICA (double the amount of FICA you pay as a salaried employee). For anyone living in an American city, that represents a net that’s just in the middle-income range. Remember: your net is 50 to 60 percent of gross.

With this in mind, when a client approaches us, we ask to see ten to twenty pages of the project from more than one section of the copy. (Writers often will start out gangbusters but fade as they plod toward the end, and so material deeper in the document may be significantly harder to edit than the first few pages.) We then sit down and edit the sample copy, timing the process. From there we can extrapolate how difficult the material is and how long it will take us to read it. The harder the copy and the more time it will consume, the higher our per-page rate.

The Advantage of Charging Per Page or Per Project

Experience shows that when you cite an hourly rate to a client, the client is daunted by the uncertainty of how much the final bill will come to. What, really, does $15, $20, $30, $60 an hour mean? The client is right to worry about this.

Even if you give the person an hourly rate with a cap, you still present an ambiguous proposition. So, the client thinks, this project should cost me $850, but I could end up paying less than that? If this person charges the whole $850, do I know whether she really put in that many hours? Additionally, unless you’re dealing with highly paid professionals or business executives, most people don’t earn $60 an hour. Most people don’t even earn $40 an hour—that would be $80,000 a year. Because they don’t have to pay their own overhead—because their employer is paying for their office, matching their 401(k) contribution, and covering a large share of their health insurance premiums—they don’t recognize that what you’re asking is actually about what a person who earns $40,000 or $50,000 a year costs his or her employer. They register a $50- or $60-an-hour fee as exorbitant. 

For that reason, a fee that has a predictable bottom line sounds more reasonable, even if it amounts to more than the person would pay if it were prorated out by the hour. So, when you ask for a per-page or per-project fee, you’re more likely to earn what you’re worth. written by vh for The Copyeditor’s Desk. © 2008 

—vh
Funny about Money 

The following heartfelt desideratum comes from the Conference of Historical Journals. Although it was written for scholarly authors, writers of any stripe can profit from most of its advice (except for the passages on peer reviewing).

What Journal Editors Wish Authors Knew 
 

Submitting a Manuscript 

Know your journal.  Acquaint yourself with the scope and limits of a journal’s subject field before you submit your manuscript. 

Consult the submission procedures outlined in the latest copy of the journal.  If the editor requires three copies of a manuscript, send them.  Observe stated word or page limits.  Most editors will respond to telephone inquiries.  Many journals, on request, will provide guidelines for the preparation of manuscripts. 

Look at the footnote form employed by the journal to which you are submitting your manuscript and model your notes accordingly. 

Double space your entire manuscript, including text, block quotations, tables, and notes. 

Use endnotes rather than footnotes. 

Many historical journals practice double-blind peer review.  Authors should therefore take steps to preserve their anonymity.  The author’s name and affiliation should appear only on a separate title page.  Do not place your name on the first page of the manuscript or in the running heads.  Do not reveal your identity in the notes through the use of the first person (such as, “In my recent article in the Journal of American History, I concluded that this hypothesis was balderdash”). 

Do not send your manuscript to more than one editor at a time.  Historical journals frown on simultaneous submissions. 

If submitting illustrations with your essay, send photocopies, not original photographs or artwork. 

Most historical journals do not accept material that has appeared in substantially the same form elsewhere or is about to do so.  In addition, some journals will not accept material that is available electronically, such as through posting on a LISTSERV or mounting on a Web page.  If in doubt about a journal’s policies, explain your circumstances to the editor. 

Always include a cover letter in which you outline the substance and significance of your work.  What makes your research different from everyone else’s?  You should also identify anyone who has critiqued your manuscript.  If the editors know who has read the work, they will not have to waste time asking someone to comment on an essay only to have that person decline because he or she has already read it. 

Include in your cover letter your full physical address, phone number, FAX number, and e-mail address. 

If you want your materials returned to you, enclose sufficient postage. 

Be patient.  The solicitation of qualified outside readers and the gathering of evaluations often takes two to three months and sometimes more. 

After Acceptance 

It is the author’s responsibility to obtain the necessary permissions to quote or cite copyrighted or manuscript materials or to reproduce illustrations.  As a courtesy, provide copies of the permission letters to the editor. 

Tables are expensive to set, and some journals require authors who cannot provide camera-ready copy of their tables to pay for composition.  Clarify this point with your editor to prevent surprises. 

Once a manuscript has been set in type, do not try to rewrite it.  Changes at this stage are very expensive.  Correct only errors in fact, grammar, usage, and spelling. 

Reviewing Books 

Most history journals do not accept unsolicited book reviews or requests by potential reviewers to review a particular title. 

Always include the page numbers of quotations from the work under review and the title and page numbers from other works.  The reference will allow editors to check for accuracy even if the journal does not footnote reviews. 

Be prompt.  The historical profession is a small one.  Authors and reviewers who are continually late get reputations among editors. 

If for personal or professional reasons you cannot complete an assignment, return the review copy at the earliest possible date so that the editor may find another reviewer.  Remember that tenures and promotions are often affected by having one’s book reviewed. 

If you decline an invitation to review, editors welcome suggestions for alternative reviewers. 

Compiled for the Conference of Historical Journals by Sara B. Bearss, with the assistance of Roger D. Adelson, John C. Inscoe, Nelson D. Lankford, Michael McGiffert, Ann Gross, and John E. Selby 

Simplest answer: Write nonfiction.

Yah, I know: you want to write the Great Novel of the Western World. You want people to read your poetry. 

The GNotWW has already been written, and it probably can’t find a publisher. And everyone on the planet wants people to read their poetry…but they don’t want to read anyone else’s. 

Publishing is a business. Publishers buy what readers will read. Just now readers are reading nonfiction and genre novels. Precious few genre novels will ever make GNotWW; it’s difficult to get one published (though less so than “mainstream” or literary novels); and when you do, you’ll be lucky if you earn 10 grand on the thing. Ten thousand dollars for a year’s worth of work is not worth the effort. Even if you can crank one in six months, that still gives you a grandiose gross income of $20,000 a year. You can’t live on that. Well, you can, but no one in her right mind would want to.

Nonfiction works have the advantage of being marketable without the aid of an agent. If you have a subject—any subject—that’s useful or interesting to a reasonably large coterie of readers, you can find a publisher on  your own. Or you may be able to self-publish and sell enough of them to make it worth your while. One guy who realized he could write about maintaining his RV discovered he could make a ton of money by marketing a book on that subject through Amazon.com.

Yah, I know: crass. But my dears, business is crass. And publishing is a business.

You can find subjects that make you feel less whorish than some. A friend of mine, for example, a high-school teacher who took up magazine writing as a hobby, wrote a book on how to help your teenager succeed in high school. It was a subject that was right under her  nose: when you write about something related to your job, you are an expert on it. And anything you write that will help people in their lives will sell.

Later she went on to write YA novels. Not GNotWWs, but at least she can say she’s a novelist now.

So, look around you. What do you know, what do you do, what can you share that can make someone else’s life better? There’s your first subject.

My second published book (the first was a rewrite of my dissertation) was a trade book for Columbia, The Essential Feature. It simply described what I did for a living (I was writing for magazines at the time). The target audience was the kind of person who takes community college courses in feature writing out of a desire to become a writer with a capital W. It was not designed for journalism majors, but for people with a laptop on the kitchen table. 

You’re listening? Target your book tightly for a specific reader. Tell that person something that matters for him or her.

Visualize the person in your mind and address that reader. Do not write for yourself. Do not write about yourself, except insofar as some experience you’ve had can demonstrably be useful for the reader. Writing is not an ego trip. It’s a business.

Next: Organize your content efficiently and intelligently. With the reader in mind, present the subject in a way he or she can understand easily and access quickly. Map out a rough table of contents before you start writing. You can always change this as you go, but it will serve as a guideline to keep you going in the right general direction from the outset.

Write tight! Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Read it. Memorize it. Internalize it. Use it!!!!!

When you have a draft, revise and rewrite until you have clean copy that you feel confident actually will work for your target reader.

Edit your  manuscript. Produce clean, grammatically correct, double-spaced copy with correct spelling and consistent style throughout. Follow Chicago style for book manuscripts and Associated Press style for magazine and newspaper copy.

Find a publisher. We’re talking about books here: for periodicals, you must have a contract before you begin writing. Here’s how you find a publisher for a nonfiction book:

1. Go to the library and get a reference worked called Literary Marketplace (LMP). This book, the bible of the American book publishing industry, indexes publishers by the subjects that they publish. It also gives the names and addresses of the relevant editors.

2. Make a list of subject headings and genres relevant to the book you’re writing. For example, if you are writing a book on how to beat alcoholism, look up subjects such as “self-help,” “addiction,” “recovery,” “psychology,” and the like. If you’re writing on how to sew quilts, look up “crafts,” “interior design,” “fabric art,” and such.

3. Look up publishers that say they’re publishing in those subjects and genres. Carefully note down

a. the acquisitions editor’s name (look for titles such as “managing editor,” “nonfiction editor,” or anything that appears relevant to what you’re doing);
b. the person’s correct title;
c. the publisher’s complete address, including the zip code; and
d. the publisher’s telephone number, FAX, website URL, and e-mail address.

4. Double-check to be certain you have spelled all of these things right! The fastest way to put off an editor is to misspell his or her name. The second fastest way is to get the person’s title wrong.

5. Compile a list containing this information for ten or twelve publishers.

6. Write a proposal package (more about which below).

7. Write a cover letter to go with the proposal. Customize it for the first six publishers on your list (i.e., address it to the correct editor and adjust whatever you say in the first paragraph to target that publisher).

8. Mail out a half-dozen proposals at once. (Yah, I know: publishers hate that. Writers hate getting screwed, too.)

9. As each rejection comes in, send another proposal to the next publisher on your list. Always keep your proposal in circulation!

10. In the unlikely event that you go through the whole list without selling your book proposal, go back to the library compile a list of another dozen potential publishers, and repeat the process.

Sooner or later you will find someone who will publish your book. If you don’t, then it’s time to come up with some other subject.

What is a book proposal and how do you write it?

A nonfiction book proposal is simply a description of what you’re writing plus an argument for why it should be published. It consists of these elements:

1. a cover letter stating what the book is about, who will read it and why, what similar works are on the market, and who you are and why you are so eminently qualified to write it;

2. a table of contents;

3. a detailed outline of the book’s contents (i.e., what’s in each chapter); and

4. three sample chapters, or an introduction and two sample chapters.

As you can see, the beauty of this for the wretch who dreams of making a living as a writer is that you need not have completed the book before you present it to publishers. A proposal is just that: a proposal. Once you have a running head start on your  manuscript, you’re ready to start marketing it. If you’re even moderately successful, you should land at least a small advance that will help support you while you’re writing.

Unless you stumble upon a very hot topic, as a beginning writer you can’t expect much in the way of an advance. Once you have a couple of books in print, though, you should be able to command $10,000 or $20,000 for a salable proposal. Maybe.

If you want to earn any more than that—or sell future books to publishers—you’ll need to do most of the marketing yourself. That’s another story.

Just remember: Publishing isn’t art. Publishing is a business.

–vh

The current economic downturn has driven the sales of most objects to an all-time low, books included. Although editors may quiver with fear over the thought of books disppearing as physical objects, in all honesty editors will always serve a distinct purpose. People need to share information, be it online, through a mailing list, or in the pages of a traditional paper-ink-binding book. The stuff still needs to be checked and rechecked by a set of trained eyes. An editor’s work is never done.

BUT…as an editor I have a great deal of affection for the written word and its physical manifestation, the book. The New York Times printed an op-ed piece about the future of the book, and I happily side with the author’s argument that the book does not have to become obsolete.

So, for anyone that also finds books to be charming manifestations of ideas I suggest giving books as gifts this holiday season. Not only can you personalize this sort of gift, but a personal note on the inside cover is a special touch that lets your loved one know why you picked this specific book for them.

Besides…who needs another tie or sweater anyway.

ARRRRRGHHHHHH! We just finished copyediting a manuscript that was freaking torture to read. 

Why?

Not because the writing was so bad (well, it wasn’t great, but it could have been tolerable). The author turned an otherwise workable book manuscript into a horror show by infesting it with an unending series of word-processing quirks.

For reasons unknown to God nor Man, he set all the paragraphs hanging indent. Then, trying to fix that, he pushed the first lines flush with the indented lines by HITTING THE SPACE BAR. Over and over and over again. Where he wanted an indented first line, he hit the space bar a few  more times. Where he wanted an indented block, he set the copy boldface. 

Irrationally, he varied the fonts throughout the copy. Some of the stuff was set in Comic Sans! No, not heads & subheads: this would pop up in the middle of a paragraph.

And he had no clue about subheadings, and so he set them with zero consistency…at what appeared to be the same level, some were boldface, some were italic, some were bold-face run-in; some had line spaces before and after, some had no line spaces. Figuring out how to set the subheads turned into an endless, annoying guessing game.

If you are a writer, please: get smart about typing your manuscript. Even if you’re going through a vanity press—which this guy was doing—someone has to copyedit and typeset your golden words. Try not to make their lives miserable.

First, learn to use a word processor. If you don’t know how to use Word or WordPerfect and you don’t want to take the time to learn, hire a typist to prepare your manuscript.

Next, decide what the heads and subheads will look like and stick to it. Headings are organized by “levels”: Level A is the chapter heading. Level B is the highest level of subheading. Level C is the next level. And so on to infinity: these correspond roughly to what your copy would look like if it were outlined:

I. Level A
     A. Level B
     B. Level B
          1. Level C
          2. Level C
                 a. Level D
                 b. Level D

Each of these should have its own format.

Level A, a chapter heading, is typically flush left or centered, 14 points, roman (“regular” type), caps and lower-case.

This Is a Level A Head
 

Level B is commonly set boldface, 12 points (the same size as the body copy), caps and lower-case, flush left, one line space before and one line space after.

This Is a Level B Head

Level C is usually italic, 12 points, caps and lower-case, flush left, one line space before and one line space after. If your MS has no level D heads, then Level C heads may be set run-in: as the first line of the paragraph, set flush left.

This Is a Level C Head

Level D is usually italic, 12 points, sentence style, flush left, run-in to the paragraph.

This is a level D head. It is set run-in to the paragraph, like the first sentence of the graf only set in italic. It may or may not be a complete sentence, but all should be grammatically consistent. If one is a full sentence, they all should be full sentences.

All body copy should be set flush left, 12 points, sentence style, DOUBLE SPACED!!!!! No space between the paragraphs! 

Hanging indents must be made with your word processor’s hanging indent function! Do not, do not, do NOT hit the return key at the end of each line and the tab key at the beginning of the next line! Writers who do this will spend eternity in Hell trying to learn the Devil’s Own Word Processing System.

In Word, go to the Format menu and scroll down to Paragraph. In the window that comes up, find the line that says “Special.” Click on the little down arrow next to that word and, in the tiny menu that comes up, select “hanging.” You can either highlight the typed copy you would like to set as hanging indent and apply this function retroactively, or you can select Format > paragraph > special > hanging before you start to type a passage. To stop the hanging indent, go back to Format > paragraph > special and select “None.”

Block indents are similarly NOT MADE by hitting the return key and the tab indent! Don’t even think of trying that stunt.

In Word, on your standard toolbar (at the top of the screen) you should see an icon (a tiny picture) that shows a little squiggly line of type, then a right-pointing arrow with two more little squiggly lines, and then another line below the arrow. This is the “increase indent” button. Click on this to make a whole paragraph indented. To undo it, find the similar icon with a left-pointing arrow. This is the “decrease indent” button. It will make an indented paragraph set flush left.

Again, you can highlight a passage you would like indented or simply turn the function on before you start to type material you would like to set as indented block and then turn it off when you’re done.

Use the same font throughout, and use a standard font! Restrain yourself from trying to be artsy-fartsy with your manuscript. Remember that the page size will be different from the 8 1/2 x 11-inch pages you are typing on, and so attempts to take a passage and “shape” it will be lost. The best you can do is suggest to the layout artist how you would like to see the passage (if, for example, it’s one of those poems where the bard tries to use line lengths to build an urn or some such). Do not expect that the printed version will look the same as your manuscript, and do not try to force it to do so. IMHO, the best choice of fonts, unless your publisher asks for 10-point Courier, is 12-point Times or Times New Roman.

Some writers and publishers like to use the Styles function. I personally do not care for this, because it can complicate on-screen copyediting, and I wish people would not use it.

So, the Rules:

1. Use a plain-vanilla font.
2. Double-space throughout.
3. Set body copy flush left, using either the indent first line function (Format > paragraph > special > first line) or the tab indent key to indicate the first line of each paragraph.
4. Use the word processor’s hanging indent function to create hanging paragraphs (Format > paragraph > special > hanging) and the block indent function to create block indent paragraphs for quotations and the like (“increase indent” and “decrease indent” buttons on toolbar).
5. Set subheads flush left, no indent.
6. Decide on formatting that will distinguish each level of subhead, and use it consistently.
7. Refrain from trying to create cute or artsy effects with the type. Leave that to the typesetter, please. Show the typesetter with a separate page demonstrating what you want, title the page something like “Graphic 1,” and mark the passage to be cutesified with a call-out: <COMP: please follow formatting shown on Graphic 1>. 

This is not hard.

When authors approach us with their manuscripts, many are not sure what an editor actually does. We cannot magically force a major publisher to accept your work or convince the masses to drive to the nearest bookstore to purchase it. But, we can take your words and clean them, polish them, and give you new perspective.

In this way, an editor, at least a good one, will aid authors in finding their voices. This is done by ensuring consistency, clarity, and an honest opinion of the possibilty of finding an audience for a specific work. An editor thus works hand-in-hand with an author making suggestions and changes as the work evolves.

A proofreader, on the other hand, is a final set of eyes. A good proofreader is looking more for the ever-present mistakes that happen in the process of transforming an electronic file in to an actual physical object. This process lends to minor errors in spelling, a missed comma here or there, and the typical spacing issues. The proofreader does not communicate with the author (unless a major issue arises), and is employed instead by a publisher that needs a keen, sharp set of eyes.

So, whether you are in need of an editor or proofreader, or are looking to work as an editor or proofreader, be clear that there is a difference. Editing takes a great deal more time and effort, and is thus a more costly service for authors…although we here at The Copyeditor’s Desk believe an editor’s input is worth every penny.

-TM