Category Archives for "All Posts"

The secret to standing out in your industry

When I got the interview for one of my first writing jobs, I was over the moon. I spent days researching the company, the industry and where it was going. I stalked people at the company on LinkedIn and even managed to have a pre-interview coffee with a former employee, which gave me inside information […]

0 Top 10 self-publishing posts of 2014

As the year winds to an end it’s easy to get caught up in the silly season. Then suddenly it’s mid-January and you haven’t written anything for a month, your editor is impatiently tapping her toe and you need to push your entire self-publishing process back.Not anymore – browse through our 10 most popular self-publishing […]

0 If your editor wants to talk, pick up the phone!

I’ve had two recent cases of client telephone (or email) tag.The first was a post-editing consultation – I’d made a lot of changes to the entrepreneur’s book and had recommended adding a couple of new chapters, and was keen to discuss my changes and their ideas before he submitted the book for a second round […]

So, you think you can write a book? Then what?

I’d imagined for many years what it would be like to write a full-blown book. Not a large blog post, but a book – one that you could touch and feel.Most of my adult life I have thought of this idea; however, with the exception of a few paragraphs here and there, in developing blogs […]

0 Client case study: the Crazy Mummy

Llew Dowley, the author of Crazy Mummy Syndrome, came to Grammar Factory as a first-time author in late 2013.At the time she had just gone into business as The Buzz Writer offering web content writing, website design and management services. However, being a new entrepreneur, Llew didn’t yet have the experience and case studies to write a […]

0 3 ways with hyphens and what to do with a dash

Should you hang in there with a hyphen or get dramatic with a dash? Good question, and fortunately there’s an easy way to answer it. Although they look alike, hyphens and dashes are used for very different reasons. Hyphens are joiners; they help words hold hands. Dashes, in contrast, are drama queens that like to […]

Distributing a self-published book: 4 distribution options for self-publishers

You’ve done it! The sweat and tears have paid off, you’ve prepared your book for distribution and you finally have a book ready for market. So what are your options for distributing a self-published book?Selling copies through your business or via your website is an option, but what about all of the potential buyers who have […]

Distributing your self-published book – where do you start?

You have boxes of your printed books (or you’re planning to print boxes of your book) and a page on your website to sell them. But is this really the best strategy? Unless your website is getting several thousand unique visits a week, you’re going to struggle to reach new audiences and see a return […]

Commas correctly used: 5 compulsory commas you need to know about

The humble comma is the smallest, lightest, briefest of pauses available in English grammar. It’s the baby of the punctuation marks. But babies, commas often find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The chief function of a comma is to indicate where we should pause when reading a sentence. This pause is […]

0 Top 5 Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers

Self-publishing your own book requires a hell of a lot more than the writing alone. In fact, writing is only a small part of a much larger process, and one of the largest steps in that process is marketing. Without a big publishing house behind you, marketing is one of the most important aspects for […]

0 It’s versus its: how to place apostrophes without embarrassing yourself

The apostrophe is one of the hardest working punctuation marks in the English language. Not surprisingly, it’s also one of the most misused. Debate has raged among grammarians over some of its more esoteric uses,but the rules for its two most important functions (possession and omission) are pretty clear. We’ll look at those functions here, […]

0 Punctuation 101

In 2003, an unknown British author named Lynne Truss wrote a little book called Eats, Shoots and Leaves. To the astonishment of both author and publisher, the book sold over three million copies, and Lynne was able to fulfil her dream of quitting her day job and writing full-time in her pyjamas. The subject of her […]

0 Why are there typos in my edited book?!

Occasionally I have a client comment that they found typos in their book after a structural edit.Most of the time they’re okay about it – they realized that we significantly reworked their content, chopped a third of their word count, created a five-step process from 28 unrelated chapters, consolidated repetition and made detailed recommendations on […]

The ROI of Your Business Book

We aren’t just living in the information age anymore… we have entered the age of information overload! Between our smart phones, tablets and laptops we are bombarded with news items, blog posts, advertising, email, personal messages, tweets, articles, status updates and an inordinate amount of cat memes and inspirational misquotes. And most of what we […]

0 How an edited book is like some new jeans

Disclaimer – This is not my butt. The photo’s from Macy’s.Earlier this year my parents went to the US. And, because my mum is a bit of a clothes horse (and the prices are so much better over there), they went shopping. I benefitted. ;)Unfortunately, my mum often forgets that I’m 1-2 sizes larger than […]

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