SONNY BREWER, editor
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          For help with books & writing,
the EDITOR is IN...

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John Sledge, book page editor & David Poindexter, MacAdam/Cage
The old saw still cuts quick and deep:
Everybody needs an editor.

     Your best odds of snagging an agent's or editor's attention--and holding a reader's interest--is to have your work at the top of its form when you finally get your allotted half-minute of consideration.
     My first agent had only two assistants, and got 100 submissions a week. You don't get much time at an agent's or editor's desk.

    

        You need an editor. Publishing houses are doing less and less editing, paying sloppy attention to refining your manuscript. A first-round copy-edit for misspellings and grammatical mistakes is often all a writer gets.
     Your book comes out and tanks and you think that maybe
one reason is you had a better book than made it to press. But it's too late.


         If you saw the recent article in Poets &Writers about a day in the life
of a literary agency, maybe you were upset to learn how an agent rejected 18 manuscripts and set aside 4 manuscripts for further consideration, all in the space of 14 minutes. Let's see, 22 books that maybe took some 50 years of writing assessed in less than a quarter hour!
     Kurt Vonnegut Jr said the most damning mistake a writer can make is playing games with language while forgetting to simply tell a good story.  Assuming you've got a good story to tell and mostly know how to do that, finding a devoted editor--finding your editor--will be the best money you'll spend to advance your writing career.


     Maybe I am your editor.
     To begin, I need a written intro from you, and the first 10 pages of your work. For a fee, I will read what you send and report back to you. We'll take it from there.

     As a veteran in the writing business, I've been a newspaper editor; was editor-in-chief at the city magazine in Mobile, Alabama; edited and published my own 4-color glossy magazine, The Eastern Shore Quarterly; I also edited the Southern Bard and the Red Bluff Review.
         I love anthologies, and edited the 5-volume anthology series, Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe; also, Don't Quit Your Day Job--Acclaimed Authors & the Day Jobs They Quit.
        I also served as editor-in-chief at MacAdam/Cage, an independent publisher in San Francisco. 

     I'm a writer (click to browse) too, with four novels, a children's book, a self-help book,
and a biography on my bookshelf (plus some writerly keepsakes and pictures of friends from out on the book trail--click here & see).

     So, nowadays, I'm carefully choosing manuscripts and working with fewer writers. I am looking for a few good authors with talent like those I have already worked with over the last 20 years.

        My reading fee for 10 pages is $99. If we team up, I'll edit your manuscript for 7 cents a word. As a sort of trial run of what to expect, I will edit your first 20 pages for $349. That's a little better than the going rate for all-in editing services from the likes of, say, AuthorHouse, recently bought by Penguin's parent company. Here's a link:
                    http://www.authorhouse.com/Servicestore/ServiceDetail.aspx?ServiceId=BS-519

     Ok, start with something in writing: email sonny@sonnybrewer.com
and let's see what happens.


        And, by the way, I'm available for speaking engagements
and teaching situations.

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With Howard Bahr, author of BLACK FLOWER and PELICAN ROAD
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