Thanks to Geoff Hart, whom you have encountered in these virtual pages before, you can enjoy this –– er –– humorous take on the fonts debacle.

They’re way beyond the elements of style!

Times New Roman was a terrible, terrible choice for a default serif font in Word–and the fact that it is the Word default font is the reason so many people use it. It was designed to be used in a narrow newspaper column (the Times of London), and as such it is a semi-condensed face. That means that with normal (default) margins on US letter-size paper, there are too many characters on a line for comfortable, extended reading.

If you’re going to recommend TNR for mss., you need to recommend, as well, that margins be bumped up to 1.5 inches. That leaves a 5.5 inch type column, and 12 point TNR is satisfactory (if boring) on that measure, because it averages 65 characters per line–close to the limit for extended reading.

However, there are much better choices, even within the default font set that installs with Word, for reading comfort.

So there it is. Times New Roman isn’t your friend, any more than Courier is; so be aware of that, and that there may be issues with your favorite font, as well.

To clarify, I’m speaking here mostly of printed documents that will be sent out as queries and proposals, not as manuscripts to be read on-screen, where one can, of course, change the font so that one can read in whatever way makes one comfortable.

Dick does add:

Oh, and I completely agree with you about Courier. I see it recommended all the time in books about submitting to agents. I even see it listed as a requirement on agent sites. But there’s really no good reason for it that I can see.

Learning about fonts (as I clearly still am) is part of being … beyond the elements of style!

I believe that one of the Writer’s Digest books is still advocating the use of Courier. I hope not, but it must be so, because here it is 2008 and I’m still getting manuscripts formatted in Courier. Fiction, all of them; don’t know if that’s contributing to the problem or not.

People, people, people! Repeat after me: No more Courier! Yes, it looks like a typewriter. Is this supposed to be a good thing? Why on earth would you want to have your manuscript look like it was typed? Do you take pride in still using telephones and cars that must be cranked to get started? Do you light your home with candelabras? Do you shovel coal from your basement into your furnace? Why on earth do you want to use arguably one of the better inventions of recent times –– the computer –– and make it look like you’re not?

Trust me on this one: no one wants to read an entire novel printed in Courier. More to the point, no one wants to read a query letter or a book proposal printed in Courier. It’s difficult to read. It shows that the author really doesn’t know his or her way around a word processing application. It’s old-fashioned (and not in a good way). Did I mention that it’s difficult to read?

So what font should you use? Most people these days recommend Times New Roman. It’s a serif font that is easy to read on paper (and most of you will be submitting on paper). It doesn’t work as well for web pages –– computer viewing is a different affair altogether, one we won’t go into right now –– but for standard writing purposes, Times New Roman is your friend.

Okay: lecture over. And just to show that even Times New Roman has its detractors, read this fun piece in The Big Jewel: Less Popular Fonts Lash Out at Times New Roman.

Welcome to the 21st century, where you’ll be … beyond the elements of stye!

So for those of you who, like me, tend to sometimes use words without knowing mch about their origins, here’s a little history lesson. Chapbooks originated in the Renaissance. Paper was fairly scarce, but a growing number of people in Europe were learning to read. Chapbooks were small printed books containing stories, poetry, songs, even sermons or essays, and were sold fairly cheaply. The men who bought them from the printers and then turned around and sold them on the street (the precursors, perhaps, of modern newsstands), were called chapmen … and the books, chapbooks.

These days, chapbooks are often used for poetry collections or essay collections, and are often given as well as being sold. They are also used by some publishers as a “teaser” of sorts for an author’s forthcoming book, a promotional/marketing tool to entice readers to purchase the book itself.

As Wikipedia would have it,

No exact definition can be applied. Chapbook can mean anything that would have formed part of the stock of chapmen, a variety of pedlar. The word chapman probably comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for barter, buy and sell. The term chapbook was formalised by bibliophiles of the nineteenth century, as a variety of ephemera (disposable printed material.) It includes many kinds of printed material, such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children’s literature and almanacs. Where there were illustrations, they would be popular prints.

Want to read more? Someone at MIT did some work on chapbooks that can be found here.

And this just in: According to reader and book producer extraordinaire Dick Margulis, “Aldus Manutius commissioned the first italic types specifically to cram more words onto the pages of chapbooks, for a competitive cost advantage.”

So next time you want to mention collecting a friend’s poems into a chapbook, you’ll know whereof you speak (as will I!). And then, like me, you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

I run a national publishing consulting firm and shop manuscripts to all of the Mind/Body/Spirit publishers. Here’s what I can tell you about them:

While it is possible to shop directly to a publisher, you MUST have a very strong book proposal to accompany your manuscript — and, like anything, it helps if you have connections to people within that publishing house, especially to the acquisitions editors.

Here is more information you should know:

You must have a unique twist to your subject matter. No publisher is looking for material that has already been covered, and so much of the New Age thought/philosophy/techniques have been covered. That’s why Harper Collins, who used to be a major publisher of New Age books, rarely publishes them anymore. It wasn’t until The Secret that the MBS publishers started to really “rev” up again. Now there are a flood of Law of Attraction knock-offs on the market, but that phase will probably wear thin soon.

You had better have a very strong promotional plan and be out there promoting PRIOR to sending them your manuscript, because publishers are interested in authors who have eyeballs — in other words, those authors who are out in front of audiences where they are being seen continually. Likewise, the competition section of your proposal had better be strong, because otherwise publishers will know you didn’t do your homework.

I know the majority, if not all, of the Mind/Body/Spirit publishers. Never tell a publisher that you know you have a bestseller or that you know Oprah will want to interview you. They will see both of these statements as signs of an amateur.

While you don’t necessarily need an agent to approach many of the MBS publishers, you will want an agent or someone at the NWU to help you with your contract. I used an NWU contract advisor for my first book, which was published by a New Age publisher. That advisor was superb. She gave me eight hours of her time and went through every single detail, telling me what I should fight for and what rights I should not give away. That being said, if I had to do it over again, I would have hired a literary agent to negotiate the contract at an hourly rate, because I didn’t have the clout to get everything I wanted as a first-time author. If I’d had an agent working with me, I could have at least doubled my advance.

So, who are the few agents out there who accept New Age books? Anyone ever hear of Eckhert Tolle? I consistently shop manuscripts to Eckhert Tolle’s agent. So far, this agent has been willing to consider every client I’ve sent to him. My reputation is always on the line when I send something out, so a book has to be polished and a book proposal has to be exemplary before I will ever send it out to someone who can command the kind of advance that Tolle’s agent can command.

Then there’s Sylvia Brown’s agent, but she only takes manuscripts that she believes will get a high six or seven figure advance and you had better have the promotional plan in place to prove it.

There are a few other agents I work with who shop to MBS publishers and there are still other agents I hire to negotiate contracts when I’ve found a publisher for one of my clients. They will negotiate a contract for $50/hour and
have taken about five hours to do contracts for me in the past.

So, there you have it. I hope this letter does not come across as self-serving. It is truly my intention to provide information that helps those who publish in the Mind/Body/Spirit genre to have the success they desire.

Much of this is good advice that transcends genres. As you know, putting together the best possible book proposal and brilliant query letter, having a platform, and having a terrific manuscript are the keys to getting published anywhere, though perhaps particularly so in this niche area. Follow his advice and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

It’s not a new issue: faithful readers will remember that I addressed it once already in my post titled Happy Labor Day. But if Business Week has something to say about it, then it’s more of a major issue than it was when I addressed it in 2006.

My friend and colleague, Geoff Hart, has an interesting take on it that I think is absolutely right on:

We’ll never be able to compete with Indian editors on the basis of price, and competing based on quality is unlikely, at least in the long term. Let’s not forget that many Indians are every bit as skilled with English as we are, since it’s often their native language. And with roughly four times the population of North America (and probably a comparable ratio for Europe), there will potentially be four times as many good editors — and four times as many bad ones, of course.

We can offer only two things that Indian editors can’t reliably provide: skill in our local dialect of English, and proximity to our clients. The former is one of those things that translators like to debate, namely whether you can produce prose indistinguishable from that produced by a skilled local. The best translators believe you can, but in my experience (with French), they’re fooling themselves (i.e., judging others based on their own skills). Very few translators can hide their native tongue well enough to fool me. I’ve heard the same observation from several full-time translators whose opinions I respect.

Proximity is no longer such an issue, particularly for those of us who earn more than 90% of our income from clients on other continents whom we’ll never meet. But for some clients, it’s important: they like the ability to phone during regular working hours or request an office visit or otherwise know that we’re available on a moment’s notice. To retain such clients, we need to give top-notch customer service so they have no reason whatsoever to look elsewhere. That’s true of all clients, by the way: the easier we are to work with, the more human nature (i.e., laziness) makes it likely that clients won’t look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, many clients and potential clients see editing as a commodity, and commodities will always be purchased at the lowest price. In the context of this discussion, that means India. These clients aren’t worthy of our time — there are still clients who appreciate our value, and will pay for it. But let’s be realistic: basic copyediting skills, such as fixing subject-verb accords and typos, really are a commodity service. Any editor worthy of the name should be able to fix these problems.

The only thing that allows us to rise above our colleagues and command a premium price is the ability to provide specialized services, and that means we need to find a niche where our expertise is worth the extra money. For me, that’s science editing, and specifically the subset that relates to journal articles written by non-English scientists. I provide heavy substantive and developmental editing (based on 20+ years of working with journals and learning their criteria) along with polishing the language, and for people who need what I provide, a nonspecialist simply can’t compete.

So the question to ask yourself is the following: What do I offer beyond a commodity service? Market that value-add to your clients. It’s no guarantee that you’ll never lose a client to an Indian or other editor with equally specialized skills, but it does reduce the risk.

There’s far more editing work out there than any one group of editors can handle — the trick is to find it. At some point, the amount of editing work required domestically in India will become sufficiently large that Indian editors will begin satisfying the needs of their domestic market first. That should relieve some of the pressure on us Westerners.

Of course, getting from here to there will be difficult. One useful option is to begin capitalizing on another major outsourcing trend, which is seeing much technical writing being shipped to India, where much software and hardware development is going on. (Ditto for China.) All writers need an editor, and for Indian companies (or branches of Western companies) that will be selling their products around the world, localization (culturally sensitive translation) of their documentation will become important. That’s where editors can become extremely useful.

The mills may indeed be closing, but there’s always something you can do with an improved and focused skill-set. Bear that in mind — and visit Geoff online at www.geoff-hart.com. Then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

My local writing group recently lost a member, and we’d been wanting to expand anyway, so the need to incorporate new members has become quite pressing. And it’s brought up a lot of questions that are probably good to consider: who are we? What are the group’s goals? Who exactly is the person we want to have join us? Is there an ideal candidate? What can we offer that person? What do we need from him or her?

And can the group come to a consensus around any of these issues?

These are valid questions, I think, to ask of any writing group, local or virtual, large or small. We happen to be asking them because we want to have some new members join us; but you might want to consider asking them even if your group isn’t looking to expand. It’s easy to lose focus, to forget the original (or even evolving) mandate, to lose track of what you’re doing. Questions like these bring you back to the center.

One of my clients is a marketing firm that recently engaged me to write an operations manual for the company. An operations manual sets out everything about the company, from where the paper for the copier is located to the policy around sick days, from the specific steps entailed in everything the company does to how it hires new employees. It forces a company to review in minute detail every aspect of its business, much of which has never been articulated or was articulated so long ago that it’s been forgotten. In essence, the operations manual tells the company’s story.

Staying in touch with one’s story isn’t just important in the corporate world: it’s important for any group. The story allows for group members to bond, to recall common goals, to feel part of something larger than any individual member. Losing a sense of history means losing part of ourselves. And any group needs that backstory, the communal equivalent of “how I met your mother.”

Groups also need the ongoing part of the story: this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is why we do it. My writing group decided early on, for example, to break with the common genre-specific considerations: we are fiction writers and poets, and have discovered that having a good mind and a willingness to take risks compensates for not being as schooled in each others’ genres. It’s a decision that has worked for us, and certainly would not work for others. It’s part of our story, and it needs to be articulated.

Think of the groups to which you belong (and if you don’t belong to a writing group, seriously consider joining or starting one). What are their stories? Is your story still aligned with theirs? A periodic refresh of this process can be enormously helpful. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Repeat after me: it is no longer the convention to place two spaces between sentences.

To my amazement, this seems to be one of the most difficult changes to the way we produce copy for people to accept. And some simply don’t. One of my consulting clients, a marketing firm, has two very highly placed employees who refuse to believe me and continue to place the two spaces between sentences despite my constant and no doubt annoying entreaties to remove one of them. They’re both old enough to have taken typing classes on typewriters, so I’ll cut them a very little slack; but other clients, far younger, are having the same difficulty.

Yet there’s not a single usage guide today that advocates doing so. In fact, a colleague of mine tells me that when he was learning typesetting in 1954 he was told to not insert two spaces!

Typewriters use fixed-width or monosized fonts. Computer fonts (with the exception of Courier, meant to duplicate the look of a typewriter) do not. Treating computers like typewriters –– and making the assumption that rules that work with one will work with the other — is just plain silly.

There are a few resources out there that deal with this particular issue along with other transitions from fixed-font to variable-font devices: Robin Williams’ two books, The Mac is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Macintosh (as well as an edition for PC users) are excellent if a little dated (they came out as revised editions in 1995).

A succinct summary of the convention is available in an article in Upper and Lower Case Magazine, Double Spaces Between Sentences … NOT!, in which the author, Ilene Strizver, notes,

Conversely, nearly all computer fonts (except Courier) have proportional spacing, which means that the width of the characters and the spacing surrounding them are in proportion to each other. Proportional spacing results in a more even, balanced appearance. Because of this, a single space is enough to create the necessary visual separation between sentences.

So … don’t do it. One space after punctuation (periods are most frequently abused, though some writers add double spaces after colons, semicolons, and even commas as well) is the current law of the publishing land. Don’t make your manuscript stand out because of its errors, especially one as easily fixed as this one (a global search-and-replace will take care of it nicely).

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

It has often seemed to me that science fiction writers are the people most at home on the web, the people least surprised by its possibilities, the folks most likely to see its uses. This only makes sense: they are, after all, the ones most at ease with potential technology, spending their days writing coherent stories about complex possible worlds.

So it’s not surprising that they’ve come up with new and different ways to approach issues specific to writing and publishing.

During the early brouhaha over Publish America’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) as a publishing venue, it was a group of science fiction authors who banded together to disprove PA’s claim that it vetted manuscripts by composing a truly awful novel (that did, in fact, get accepted for publication). And it’s science fiction authors who co-host Predators and Editors, which has hopefully helped steer many unwitting authors-to-be in the right direction.

Not new, but not widely known, either, is the Turkey City Lexicon, a site meant to help science fiction writers workshop (or critique) each others’ work by giving them nice packages that say, far better than could any one individual, what might be problematic about a given passage. Named for the Austin, Texas workshop that was the cradle of cyberpunk, the lexicon has gone through a number of different editions (carefully uncopyrighted), and is as hilarious (and as thoughtful) today as it was back in 1988.

Here, for example, we can find Brenda Starr Dialogue (”long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters”), the Squid in the Mouth (”the failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author’s remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth”), and the Kudzu Plot (”Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”).

Much of what is offered in the Lexicon is, in fact, very good advice for anyone writing anything, and I highly recommend reading it, laughing over it, and taking it to heart. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

The presentation is very user-friendly: you can use the site search functionality, of course, but you can also click on a scrolling timeline, which allows you to browse for something that may be of interest. As a historical novelist myself, I’m very excited about the potential here, both for research and also — frankly — for trolling for ideas!

You’ll also see a separate photograph archive, some featured articles, the ability to do a single-day search (along the lines of “this day in history”), and Times recommendations.

Why am I so excited? After all, the History Channel’s been offering something similar on its site for years.

The point is that this is primary source material. It’s not someone’s account of what may have happened, it’s what the newspaper reported happening. Authentic, not too biased (no reports are completely unbiased), and arranged in such a way that the user can get information quickly and easily.

Note that there is currently a free introductory period for use of the archives; it’s unclear what the cost will be later on down the line, but it’s sure to be well worth it to those of us needing the resource. It has my vote for Site of the Month, that’s for sure! Check it out yourself, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

ADDENDUM: My colleague and friend Dick Margulis (he of Ampers&Virgule fame) has helpfully noted that “The date widget is day-month-year rather than the American-style month-day-year. So if someone is looking for news on a particular date, they should be careful to enter it in the right order.”

(You can tell that he’s beyond the elements of style!) Thank you, Dick!