[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to small publishing in a big universe.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: I am your host, L. A. Jacob.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: This month's interview is with Robert Runte.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: A longtime editor coming from our sponsors. This month from Water Dragon Publishing is.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Revan's heart by even D. Brewer in Dragon Gems. This month the credo of Comrade January by Robert Bagnall, one for the road by Melissa M. Bull and Brian C.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: E. Bowl Enlightenment by Bruce golden, two by Kellyan Silvera and a new Dragon.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Gems collection for winter 2024.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: A young man from a poor mining town has pulled himself up by his.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Bootstraps to become the student apprentice of a law professor.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: But then everything goes wrong.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Their airship is captured by pirates, and Revan loses his mentor. Born female, Revan must make his way in a world oriented towards men while he struggles with his own identity. Set against the backdrop of a war between island nations, a young man must navigate a world divided between the aristocracy.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: And the common people.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: And as a promising young man, he must choose whom to align himself with.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: And whom to serve. But what does Revan's heart say?
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Revan's heart, by Stephen D. Brewer, is available this month from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, smashwords, and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstore by ordering it through bookshop.org. For more information, visit their website at.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Waterdragonpublishing Comte I was the acquisition editor.
[00:02:10] Speaker C: For a small Canadian Press for about a decade, and then I've started my own freelance editing company, and that's been going since 2010, and my whole life has been one form of editor or not.
[00:02:21] Speaker D: How do you approach a manuscript and what do you look for?
[00:02:24] Speaker C: First, we sort of need to distinguish between the types of editors that you're working with, because an acquisition editor for a press or magazine is going to be different than a freelance editor, different than a copy editor, and so on. At an acquisition editor, I take a very phenomenological approach, which is to say, I just start reading. I don't read the synopsis, I don't read the COVID letter, because I want to have the exact same experience that a reader would picking up that book and reading it. Of course, it's not really the same experience because I have a more critical eye. I'll keep going longer than somebody in a bookstore who picked the book up off the shelf. Often they'll read three paragraphs, no, not for me.
[00:03:01] Speaker E: And put it back.
[00:03:01] Speaker C: I'll go a little further. What I find is that I basically keep reading until I find a fatal flaw. If I see a few bumps in a road that's okay, because I'm an editor. I can fix that. It's when I fall completely out of the manuscript because they've done something that isn't going to work, or I keep reading until I become so bored I find I'm not paying attention. And in either of those, it's kind of, that's a rejection. If I keep reading and I don't fall out of the text, I don't get bored. Then that manuscript goes into the maybe pile, and then at that point, I'll read the synopsis. I've already liked the writing. I've liked the characters. I've liked the sample that I've read the first three chapters. At that point, I need to know what the book is about in the bigger picture, because when I first started out, I was tricked a couple of times. I had this fascinating mystery. I said, well, there's no solution. I want what's going on. And the answer was aliens. That's not what I wanted for a mystery novel. It's amazing how many people try and hide the ending. And then there's a surprise. No, I'm your editor. You can't surprise me. I have to know. Otherwise I'm not taking it. So that's my process. What I find is there are a lot of misunderstandings about that process. Many people believe, and that acquisition editors are sort of reading to find the flaw so they can reject it and get on to the next one. And there is some truth in that. If I see a really horrible problem that I'm not going to be able to fix easily, I'm going to put that manuscript aside and go to the next one. The more popular presses, they're getting 1000 manuscripts a week. The editor doesn't have time to say, well, how could I fix this if it's a terrible problem? So there is some truth to that. But the other half of that is that every editor, every schlushpile reader is pulling for the author. We want the author to succeed. We want to find that amazing book in our stack of somewhat less amazing book. So we hope this is it. This is the one that's going to work for us. Minor errors aren't going to bug me, but if I'm liking the style, if I like the idea, if I'm liking the characters, then there's a good chance I'll just keep going because I can fix most things. It's amazing how people don't read the submission guidelines quite clear. I didn't do horror. I don't like horror. But because I do do fantasy. I get an awful lot of horror. No, read the guidelines. You're wasting your time and mine. Freelance Editor, then my job is to find those errors and embrace them, because I'm going to teach them how not to do whatever it is they're doing that's holding them back. When I fall out of a manuscript I'm being paid to edit, I'm going to say, okay, here's where I fell out, which is important information for the author to have. This is why I think that happened, and this is what you can do about it. The only thing freelance editors have, at least, I struggle with. I know a few who can deal with it. If it's boring, there's not a lot. I love it when I find a common error, because I can fix those. If you have too many images or not enough imagery, or if the character is unsympathetic, I could say, here's the problem. This is why this manuscript isn't going anywhere. But if there's no obvious errors, it's just kind of meh, that's harder to fix.
[00:06:04] Speaker D: What do authors seem to get consistently wrong?
[00:06:07] Speaker C: The problem word there is consistently. And the truth is, every author is on a continuum of error. So every author I say, oh, you have too much description. It's drowning in description. The story, the action, the pacing is off because you're so busy describing things. For every one of those authors, there's somebody else. I have to say, you have no description. What the hell are you thinking? You have to have more than a green screen behind which the characters are doing things. So I'm very cautious when seeing workshops or how to books that say, here's the problem and how you fix it, because that works for this person, and it may even work for a majority of writers. But it's going to screw up this guy over here because he's the one person who doesn't have any description. So that said, I can talk about some common things I get across my desk. One of the most common is authors not knowing where to start the novel. So what I see is people not understanding that. You start with the initiating incident. You start with the thing that changes. The heroes, the protagonist, the viewpoint character's life. What's different today, this hour, than it was 2 hours ago? So what you get is a lot of people who spend 15 2030 pages showing the before picture. Start with the action. You got to hook your reader and keep the pressure on the character as they keep turning so many pages. They've been standing there 15 minutes in the bookstore and now feel they have to buy the book because the manager is looking at so very many beginning authors start way before the story starts. The other crawlery with that is that many people include prologue. Many editors I know if they see the word prologue that goes in the no pile because the ods of the person using prologue correctly are 100 to one. So there are books that need a prologue. But if this is your first book, the chances are the prologue is because the author couldn't really decide where to start the book, having gone back and forth. Should I start it here or should I start it there? Cheats and starts twice. Don't do that. It's a waste of space.
[00:08:14] Speaker E: It doesn't belong.
[00:08:15] Speaker C: And then I said, description. And again, it's too much or too little in my own writing. My first editor said, there's no description. They're doing things in front of a blue screen. The word spaceship was about as much description as they got. So I have to go back and fix that. Once they pointed it out, it's obvious, and it's an easy fix. More common is the too much description. And what happens is a couple of things. One is the person really wants the audience to see what they see in their head. And the problem with that is they're over controlling. You have to let the reader collaborate with you. If I spend ten pages, describe the villain, a, that's boring and the actions stop, but b, the more you describe that villain, the more I cannot cast the guy from accounting in that role, whereas I can cast, I hate Philip so much, man. I want to kill that guy. Oh, he's going to be the bad guy. When you describe the unspeakable evil villain, yeah, that's Philip, man. But I can't do that. I can't identify with my life. I can't have that book resonate with me. If you're too busy saying, he's black with red hair and the scar across it, no. Okay. It's not Philip, apparently. So you're undermining your audience's participation, the interactiveness of the book. So that's a problem. The second problem is timing. A lot of beginning authors think the second a character comes on stage, I have to stop the action and describe them for 14 paragraphs. That's bad, because it stops the action and destroys your pacing. It's unrealistic. If we're writing from the viewpoint character's point of view, then what they see when a ninja jumps out at them with a knife is the knife. If you see actual police interviews. What did the guy look like? I don't know. He had a hoodie and a knife. That's a problem. So if your character is having an experience that has no relationship to the real world reaction to that guy with the knife, because you had to say in the ancient robes of the dinja people of Turtle island or whatever, it completely destroys that scene. Another way, we get too much description again, that sense of wanting to have the person see what you see, rather than letting them conjure up their own image that's more local to them. There's a level of detail that drowns the reader, but what we want is one or two tags that kind of place the scene and let the reader fill in more of the details. The other part of that is if this is a brilliant image, but you have 14 brilliant images on that same page, it devalues them. It's like pruning a rose bush. You only want a few brilliant images that will stay with them. That avalanche of imagery is too much. Don't overdo it again. Anytime we give these sort of general advice, it's good for 90% of people, but it's destroying that 10%. So that's why you need an editor or beta readers or a good friend. Frenemy, maybe. So he'll tell you what's wrong to look at it because we can never see our own problem. By definition, I think everything I write is brilliant, and then the next day I think it's awful. But I never see the reason because I can't see my own mistake. As soon as you see it, it's obvious. How could I have missed that? So we all are like that. There's no really use. My saying a common error is that you lose track of characters, because that may not be your error and it doesn't help you if you don't think of it. That chapter. Sometimes an editor won't like it because you sent it to the wrong editor. Whether it's an acquisition editor or a freelance editor, you want somebody who gets your vision. Sending me a horror book is a waste of your time because I'm not going to like it doesn't mean it's a bad book. I don't read that stuff because I don't want those images in my head. It is your responsibility to have more than one editor look at it. If we're talking acquisition editors, you have to research your markets. You have to make sure that those submission outlines apply to your book. And then you send it in and you hope it's not just errors that make that editor say no. He might say no because that publishing company just published the identical book three months ago, and there's no way they're taking your book on fly fishing or whatever, because they'd be competing with themselves. They have to wait five years before they take the next dinosaur and Mars book, or whatever it is. It may not be what that particular imprint, even when you send it to the right place, some of them are going to like and some are not. And again, it's random chance. So you do have to check with a couple of different presses. If you have your book, don't stop when you get the first rejection letter. On the other hand, if you're getting a bunch of rejections, you might say, maybe there's something that's not I'm not in the ballpark yet. And again, writing groups, writing courses, beta readers mostly. You could get those for free. If you're really serious about this, investing some money to have an editor edit a book, if you're self publishing, you don't really need to edit everything every time that first book, the editor can teach you what you're doing wrong. What are the three bad habits that are holding you back? Too much backstory, too much description. Not enough description. Once those are identified to you and the editor has worked through that first book with you, that's amortized over the whole course of the rest of your career because you're not going to make those mistakes again. We're not just fixing this book. We can stop you sabotaging yourselves with those common errors that we talk about. Everybody is doing it slightly differently, and you really need at least a beta reader, at least somebody whose taste you trust, to look through your book and catch those errors. So another common example is the backstory intrusively showing up too early. You don't stop the action of him running down the street after the bad guy to have him flash back to when he was three and fell out of a tree.
[00:13:51] Speaker E: That's not going to work.
[00:13:53] Speaker C: A because it's an interruption in the current action. You stop the car chase to say that. It's also that it's not what a viewpoint character would think. You don't stop and explain police procedure, it just happens. The viewpoint character sees what he sees, jumps to whatever conclusion he jumps to. But I see that all the time with beginning authors. Compulsive bloat, which is kind of pretentious imagery, long winded Jane Austen kind of style. It's not going to work with a modern reader for commercial fiction, again, literary.
[00:14:23] Speaker E: Is a different thing.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: The first thing you have to do after you finish your first draft is go out and take 10% of it out, because we want concise. We want as few words as necessary to get that image into my head. Whereas a lot of books are overwritten. The idea was not a 300,000 word idea, right? It was simple idea. Be more concise. Expository lump. That's another huge one, especially in science fiction, which is what I do most of where you stop the story to explain the science. I still see that a fair bit where people want to explain. So as soon as you say, don't ever do this, no, it might not apply to you. I tell almost all my writers, get behind the eyes of one viewpoint character and stay there because that's the easiest way to write, especially if you're starting out where you're following the action, one person. It just makes things simpler, and it's also easier for the reader to identify with. Or if you have two people, two viewpoint, do alternating scenes, alternating chapters.
[00:15:19] Speaker E: That works just fine.
[00:15:20] Speaker D: Where can people contact you?
[00:15:22] Speaker C: Essential edits is one word, then CA.
[00:15:26] Speaker E: Or SF editor Ca.
[00:15:28] Speaker C: And my email is Dr. Fordoctor of a doctorate
[email protected] thank you very much.
[00:15:37] Speaker D: For all your tips and hopefully they will be beneficial to beginning and advanced writers. And thank you very much.
[00:15:44] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:15:45] Speaker E: I've enjoyed it.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: You.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Dragon Gems Winter 2024 has short tales to get you through the long winter months.
Dragon Gems Winter 2024 has everything from a one man expedition, to a watery moon, to an activist against monsters on display, to an update of a popular.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: 80S tv show and a strange folktale.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: These stories will enlighten and entertain you during any blizzard. Dragon Gems Winter 2024 is available this month from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, and other online booksellers, or support your local independent bookstore by ordering it through bookshop.org. For more information, visit their
[email protected].
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Thanks again to our guest.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: We plan on publishing new episodes every.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Second Wednesday of the month.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: Watch for new episodes around that time. To find out more about our featured products and books mentioned by our guest, please take a look at the SPBU marketplace at SPBU marketplace.com. Theme and ad music is provided by Melodyloops. If you want to know more about small publishing in a big universe, visit our website at spBu podcast.com. Send us your feedback by using the contact us link, tweet or X us at SPBU Podcast and like us on.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: Facebook at SPBU Podcast this podcast was.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Recorded and edited by yours truly. L. A. Jacob executive producer is Stephen Redecki. This month's episode was sponsored by paper Angel Press and its imprint water Dragon Publishing and unruly voices. You can hear our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services. Thank you very much for listening and talk to you sooner.
