Q&A: Royalties, Editing and Other Miscalculations

Question: I need to know if 10% is the standard royalty. And I hear it's always best to publish a novel traditionally because you will reach a larger audience and get a good editor and book cover.

Answer: I wish what you are saying were always true. It isn't. At least not enough of the time.

I'm referring especially to the part about a good line editor. Sometimes yes. Too often no. That's why I wrote the Frugal Editor. So that authors can partner with a line editor, no matter how good or bad he or she is. If you get a bad one, you won't know it unless you possess at least some of the skills. If you get a good one and submit a really clean manuscript, she'll be even better because it's easier to spot errors on clean copy. Now, that's a partnership!

And I'm not just talking typos and grammar when I talk editing. I'm talking index stuff and frontmatter and backmatter and even some formatting stuff. The more you know about publishing, the happier you'll be with your end product.

I do agree that poetry and novels are best traditionally published for a whole lot of reasons but only if you get a really good traditional publisher. Make that a top traditional publisher. Or an exceptionally good small publisher. Don't assume all traditionals are good just because they pay an advance and provide a cover. That's a generalization fraught with danger, just like any other generalization.

And royalties can go higher once you have a known name -- and maybe even if you don't. You won't know unless you negotiate. If you want the best traditional publisher, you'll need an agent to do that for you. If you end up negotiating for yourself don't just ask for a higher royalty. Show them why you deserve it. Tell them more about your platform. And if you haven't been building a platform, then you need my other book, The Frugal Book Promoter.


Best,

Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Author of the How To Do It Frugally series of books. Both are USA Book News Best Book award winners. The Frugal Book Promoter is also a Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award winner. The Frugal Book Promoter is available as an e-book at Star Publish as well as on Amazon for Kindle and as a paperback. The Frugal Editor is also available as a paperback and for the new Kindle.

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogure Sharp

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson


1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue—your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing our social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long-winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success on Amazon.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more.