Category Archives: How-To

Your Editor is Not the Enemy: Tips on Surviving Rewrites

http://marionjensen.com/wp-commentin.php Congratulations! You’ve spent months, maybe years, crafting a thing of beauty and resonance out of your own imagination, and now a publisher has finally agreed to print it. The hard part is out of the way. Now comes the even harder part—editing. A Specialized Team. A small horde of people is going to descend on your manuscript like a beauty… Read more »

Writing Under the Rainbow: The Expanding Horizons of LGBTQIA+ Fiction

http://lyndsaycambridge.com/radio.php?imam=test The last five years have seen an expansion in LGBT+ awareness, advances (and setbacks), and media representation. There’s been a similar boom in the LGBT+ book world, from genre fiction to indie and self-publishing. Even the mainstream publishing world has sat up and taken notice, releasing many new LGBT-focused titles each year. As a published author of LGBT+ fiction and… Read more »

“Put Your Write Foot In” – Leah Merrill

How to get published for the first time If you’ve never been published, the whole “non-artsy” side of the writing business can seem as daunting as a genre you’ve never written. Agents, queries, advances, proposals—frankly, I wouldn’t know where to start, either. There are enough books out there to help you land a million-dollar book deal that I won’t add… Read more »

Should I Copyright My Writing or Visual Art?

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For someone who has struggled to develop a creative work, the thought that someone might steal it for their own benefit is alarming. In the age of the Internet, theft of an artist’s work can be as simple as a click and save, and software makes it easy to paste your work into someone else’s product. You may have heard… Read more »

Arts & Numbers – Financial Planning for Artists

You sold your first piece of work! Hooray! Congratulations! Celebrate that check, because it is a major moment of creative validation. You have mad creative skills—skills with financial value. If you want to pursue your art/writing professionally it is important to understand what your talent is worth, figure out how to quantify it, and start maintaining good financial records. It… Read more »

Hiring an Editor: Where to Start

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As a professional editor, I routinely receive requests to edit all sorts of materials. However, what these prospective clients mean by “edit” may vary. Do they want me to find the weaknesses of the argument or narrative, or do they simply need someone to correct the grammar? So I often find myself helping them figure out just what type of… Read more »

Write It Off: Taxes for Creative Professionals

We know April 15th is only a few days away. Some of these ideas might be a bit late in your accounting process, but if you are anything like most of us, a few new ideas and routines to implement for 2016 are always welcome. Both Tom Sullivan and Janet Sunderland, current Whispering Prairie Press board members and long time self-employed… Read more »