For help with books & writing,
the EDITOR is IN...
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, a book of haiku poems, 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 30 years.
My reading fee for 10 pages is $99. (Which is also my hourly rate, if we ever need to hit that button.) 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. We can talk about fees.
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, a book of haiku poems, 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 30 years.
My reading fee for 10 pages is $99. (Which is also my hourly rate, if we ever need to hit that button.) 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. We can talk about fees.
With Howard Bahr, author of BLACK FLOWER and PELICAN ROAD
