Publishing

books and resources on print and digital publishing

books and resources on print and digital publishing

Editing and Revising Text

May 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

beginner’s guide to editing and re-writing

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginners’ manuals on communication skills. Their emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life. Jo Billingham’s Editing and Revising Text provides a practical approach to reworking your writing for students, office workers, and newsletter editors. She covers editing your own work and text written by others, and her whole approach is designed to help you make any writing more effective.

Every part of writing is covered – from the choice of individual words, through sentence construction and arranging paragraphs, to creating firm structure in the parts of a longer piece of work. She discusses the differences between editing, re-writing, and proof-checking, and shows how to revise sentences for brevity, simplicity, and clarity (move the subject to the start!).

There’s an interesting section on how to edit if there’s too little or too much information in the text, plus the importance of how to judge if it’s right for its intended audience.

She also covers the process of making multiple edits – on paper and screen – and quite rightly suggests that it is best to edit for one feature at a time.

I was glad to see that she emphasises the usefulness of the word-processor as an aid to editing. It’s amazing how work can be improved by using spelling and grammar-checkers, as well as the powerful tools of cut-and-paste, and search-and-replace.

The book has examples from real articles, essays, letters and reports, and the last part is a series of checklists for different types of editing – technical, academic, business, and even email.
She also gives a brief explanation of proof-reading, and perhaps the most difficult task of all – making sure that there is structural and linguistic ‘flow’.

The chapters of these guides are short and to-the-point; but the pages are rich in hints, tips, and quotes in call-out boxes. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite frightening.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jo Billingham, Editing and Revising Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.136, ISBN: 0198604130

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ePublishing and eBooks

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a selection of resources reviewed

One rapidly expanding opportunity for writers using the Internet is the creation of eBooks. These have the advantage that they can be written, stored, and sent electronically. ePublishing is available for whatever you wish; it doesn’t cost much; you can start small; there are no printing, storage, or postage costs; and you can control the whole process from your back bedroom.

eBooks can be read on desktop computers, but many people prefer to use laptops, eBook readers, or PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) such as the Palm Pilot. Other people print off the pages and read from the conventional page. So you’ve got to be prepared to supply your text in a number of different formats if you want to reach all audiences.

Creating E-books
Chris Van Buren and Jeff Cogswell address all these issues, and provide you with all the information you need to make a start. They include a survey of the e-publishing business; planning and creating an e-book; getting the book published; finance and copyright; and a selection of personal success stories. One of the more interesting features of the advice they give is that it’s suitable either for individuals with just one book to market, or for people who might wish to set up as publishers, ready to promote several titles. As usual with the excellent Topfloor ‘Poor Richard’ series, every chapter is packed with recommendations for online resources – many of which are low-budget or free.

You can market your own eBooks, but a very popular alternative is to place titles with distributors like Fatbrain and split the proceeds. There are also electronic versions of conventional publishers who will pay you royalties up to fifty percent.

The Internet Writer’s Handbook
This is a detailed guide to publishers of the two formats which are most digital – e-zines and e-books. It’s in the form of an international A-Z listing of the best websites for writers to target, with full contact details for all websites listed. It offers plenty of detail on how to submit your work , how much publishers will pay, and even how they are most likely to respond. The topics these publishers cover range from poetry and fiction, through non-fiction writing, to specialist publications.

Email Publishing
It’s quickly apparent to most writers that this system means that self-publication is an attractive option. In fact Chris Pirillo argues that email publishing can be much more effective than the Web. How is this? Well, he describes publishing via a web site as “like opening a hamburger stand in a dead-end street”. Not many people will pass by, and even fewer are likely to make a purchase.

On the other hand, almost everybody reads their e-mail, so why not use it as a vehicle for publishing instead? Some of the more popular e-mail newsletters have up to 400,000 regular subscribers. In he outlines all the possibilities – discussion groups, bulletins, and announcement lists – but it’s the free e-mail newsletter which is at the heart of this book. He takes you through all the technicalities of how to run one.

This can be used to promote your writing – or even as a hot and direct form of journalism if you are a non-fiction writer. And this guy knows whereof he speaks. He publishes several email newsletters every day, draws down revenue from advertisers, and earns a living from it.

Publish your writing

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Essays on the History of Copyright

August 4, 2010 by Roy Johnson

This is a collection of academic essays that seeks to establish legitimacy for a relatively new intellectual discipline – the study of the history of copyright. The editors in their introduction maintain that new academic disciplines arise when it generally becomes felt that there is need for them. It is certainly true that many of the technological advances of the last twenty years (in the digitization, reproduction, re-purposing, transmogrification, and distribution of various media) have brought issues of copyright, ownership, and intellectual property rights into sharp focus. And it’s important to realise that this does not only affect the printed word: films, photographs, music, paintings, even simple trademarks and branding logos have all been the subject of amazingly expensive legal disputes recently.

The essays as you might expect take a long historical perspective. Issues of copyright (indeed, even of authorship itself) did not arise as a problem until the invention of the printing press made the mass production of an important cultural object (the book) available in the fifteenth century. So, the collection begins with the granting of the first patent in 1469 for a five year printing monopoly in Venice. It’s interesting to note that since many of the first books put into general circulation were versions of Greek and Roman classics, it was their formal appearance, font design, and physical shape that was protected, not their intellectual content or authorship.

It was only later, as the number of original published works started to rise, that individual authors began to apply for what we would now call copyright; and in their cases it was permission to print and sell a single edition of a work over a long enough time span (five years) to give them a chance to cover initial costs.

In 1644 Milton issued his Areopagitica as a protest against state censorship and in favour of freedom of the press. The important point to stress here is that he was explicitly championing the free circulation of ideas. The licence-free period that followed saw the establishment of English newspapers, with sales by 1711 of up to 70,000 per week.

Meanwhile, in America, the arrival of the first printing press in Massachusetts was greeted with prohibitions, censorship, licensing, and colonial control. It was only after the War of Independence that authors successfully applied for copyright to their work.

There are chapters tracing the slight variations in law that sprang up in France, Italy, and Germany. All sorts of different systems were tried, from temporary arrangements affecting only a single work, to ‘perpetual copyright’.

There are (understandably) quite a lot of legal and even philosophical issues at stake in some of these battles over rights and regulations. These become even more complex as the first attempts were made in the late nineteenth century to establish international agreements. It should be remembered that authors such as Dickens were forced to struggle to establish their rights in the USA.

Many of today’s commercial strategies were already in play in previous centuries – so long as the technological means to create copies and profit were available. The painter Benjamin West made £400 for his famous 1771 depiction of The Death of General Woolfe, but almost one hundred times more from the engravings that were made from it.

It is also worth noting that two other factors complicated the drafting of legislation on these matters. One was the fact that the law (in Britain) was also being framed to protect the interest of the owners or the public against possibly unscrupulous artists. The second was that the idea that a work of art should be ‘new and original’ was a surprisingly late consideration, introduced only to the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Bill.

There was also separate legislation covering copyright in works of dramatic art and performance rights. Amazingly, the nineteenth century world of theatre was rife with stenographers in the audience recording the text of new plays as they were acted out on stage. These were then sold on to other theatre managers, who often claimed copyright, rather than the original author.

What this impressive collection of articles does not do is bring the arguments up into the digital age. That is understandable when its very objective is to establish a long history on which to build a new discipline. But anyone with the slightest interest in these issues of copyright and intellectual property rights will be keen to know how digitization and ease of reproduction are changing many of the traditional assumptions. Mashups, print-on-demand, open source software, file-sharing, and the new ‘hybrid economies’ of eCommerce are changing the face of copyright, ownership, and commercial rights. To keep up with these issues, you will need to look beyond the traditionalists to the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow.

It’s an interesting book production in its own right. OpenBook Publishers are a new business supplying academic print on demand (PoD) titles. The books they publish are available, free to view on line as searchable PDFs – but a file can quickly be turned into a conventionally printed and bound book for those who wish to pay for it. This title, I must say, is a handsome volume you would be pleased to have on your shelves.

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Ronan Deazeley et al (eds), Power and Privilege: Essays on the History of Copyright, Cambridge: Open Book Publishing, 2010, pp.438, ISBN: 190692418X

Copyright links

Content: Copyright and DRM

Intellectual Property and Open Source

Plagiarism, Copyright, and New Media

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Essential Blogging

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

Blogs (it’s a contraction of Web Logs) are a form of personal diary kept as Web pages. They can record anything from the trivial details of your own life to online political manifestos. But why would anybody want to read them? Well, some people have transformed the personal diary into an art form, most sprinkle their pages with useful links, others develop what amounts to a one-person daily newspaper, and a few manage to spin out an entirely new form of instant journalism.

It’s so easy, you see. All you need to do is register with a Blogging site, type your thoughts into the templates they provide, and press the Go button. A few seconds later, you’re published on the Web. Of course there’s a little more to it than that – but not much. This book offers a tour of the best blogging sites, how to upload and maintain your pages, and how to configure the options to get the best effects.

A series of chapters, clearly written by enthusiasts, takes you through which Blog sites and software are available – from Blogger, Radio Userland (free software), Moveable Type, and WordPress. Some of these have developed rapidly beyond mere blogging tools into small-scale content management systems.

All this is expanding at a breathtaking rate. Some people even have blogs running alongside serious Web sites. When you come to look at the thousands upon thousands of blogs, you will be amazed at the variety and the skill of the best.

There’s an element of evangelical fervour in all this. Many bloggers seem like techno-Hippies, but the most thoughtful, such as Meg Hourihan, have made claims for blogging as a new form of writing:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of ‘page’), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

And just in case you think this might all be a little trivial, these blogs are real Web pages. So they are tracked by search engines – and if enough people read them, they might therefore become ‘famous’. Many are already joining affiliate programmes and even attracting advertising.

If you want to join in this frenzy of personal expression, build your own soap box, or develop your own one-person newspaper – everything you need by way of instructions is in this one book.

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Cory Doctorow et al, Essential Blogging, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2002, pp.244, ISBN: 0596003889

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Facebook the missing manual

March 17, 2010 by Roy Johnson

complete guide to social networking

Facebook is flavour of the year in social networking terms right now. It didn’t start until 2004, and it already boasts a billion subscribers, with a user base which is claimed to be slightly more adult than that of My Space. But when you’ve posted all those snaps of yourself getting drunk at the parties – did you know that it’s quite difficult to take them down again just before that vital job interview? If you’re going to use Facebook and take it seriously, you need a guidance manual, and there hasn’t been one – until now. Facebook: the missing manual takes you through the whole process, step by step, from registering and creating your profile to joining networks and finding friends. And every one of those steps is spelled out in a commendably clear manner.

Author Emily Veer also reminds you at every stage that the attraction of being able to see the private details of other people’s lives means conversely that they can see yours. You should therefore think carefully about the information you make public.

Once you’ve made or located your friends, there’s a number of different ways of contacting them which are more subtle than a simple email message. You can ‘poke’ people (nudge them), ‘write on walls’ (make public statements inviting a response), and even send gifts. News feeds and blogs are built into the system, and you can participate in ‘groups’.

These groups can be based on a shared interest or hobby (physical astronomy or knitting) something you have in common (your old school), or even the locality where you live. Interestingly however, you are only allowed to join one group based on geographical location – so tough luck for second home owners.

Those are the main Facebook elements: next come the extensions to these basic functions. There’s a system of listing social (real world) events where you can arrange to meet friends. Then there’s a market place where you can place ads (which Facebook calls ‘listings’) so you can sell unwanted items (as on eBay) or buy from other people – all the while checking their credentials via what they post about themselves.

There’s also a system for job-finding and hiring people, or you can use Facebook’s bulletin boards and ‘notes’ feature to work on collaborative projects. And as on many other popular software systems, there are now free add-on applications (widgets and plug-ins) which can add functionality to the basic set-up.

The last section of the book returns, very responsibly, to the issue of privacy. Apart from showing you how to configure the advanced settings of your account, Veer recommends applying a simple rule: ‘Don’t put anything on view which you wouldn’t want your mother or your boss to know about you.” And remember that although at the time of writing Facebook is going through a re-design, it’s still very difficult to remove anything, once it’s up there.

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E.A. Vander Veer, Facebook: the missing manual, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2nd edition 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 144938014X

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Getting Published: guide for lecturers

July 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

insider tips for putting academic writing into print

We all know that in the present climate of academic writing, it’s a case of publish – or perish. The stress on doing ‘research’ then getting published is almost the only way to ‘get on’. This book tells you how to do it. Despite the dubious imperatives, Jerry Wellington starts out by looking at the huge variety of positive reasons why people write and publish – as well as the numerous fears which might prevent others from doing so. He argues largely in favour of publishing in established, printed journals on the grounds that they offer the author more credence and protection – though there’s no mention of the amazingly small number of people who ever read them.

Next comes advice in taking account of the publication in which your writing will appear, its readership, and most crucially the type of article or review and how it will best fit the editor’s requirements. There’s a long section on ‘the writing process’ based on interviews with people who describe their approaches (the planners and the improvisers) as well as their reactions to peer review and criticism. You are certain to find somebody in here who shares your own approach. He describes what to write about, and even offers a checklist on how to be original.

He then describes the process of submitting an article for publication – both from the writer’s and publisher’s point of view. Much of this is taken up with the pros and cons of the peer review process.

Then comes the case of publishing in book form. After warning quite rightly that you shouldn’t write a word until you have a contract, he then shows you how to prepare a publication proposal in great detail.

He throws in some observations and tips on the techniques of writing – how to plan and structure your work; how to edit and re-write what you produce; and how to develop a sense of ‘good writing’.

Finally he looks at future possible trends in publishing – which focus largely on electronic journals and what’s called ‘self-archiving’. Anyone interested in this development would do well to look at the work of Steven Harnad in this field.

And for those who want to take the subject seriously, this book could profitably read alongside Peter Wood’s Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers.

I wrote this review on the day the UK government announced it would allow the formation of new non-research universities. So the rules of the game may well be changing soon. For most people however, the steps to getting published in the academic world will remain the same; and they are all covered here.

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Jerry Wellington, Getting Published: a guide for lecturers and researchers, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.136, ISBN: 0415298476

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Here Comes Everybody

October 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument in Here Comes Everybody is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.

The classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

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Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp.344, ISBN: 0141030623

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House Style

October 31, 2014 by Roy Johnson

an explanation and guidance notes

House Style is a term used to describe the rules laid down by a business or organisation to regularise the presentation of its written communications and documents. In some cases these rules might be summarised formally in a published Style Guide or Style Manual.

The purpose of codifying what can be written may vary from a desire to control a corporate image (business documents); a need to maintain standards and follow established conventions (academic writing); or a need for accuracy and precision (technical manuals).

Many different types of institutions, businesses, publishers, or public bodies will establish a house style in order to maintain their corporate or brand image.

International	United Nations, European Union
Corporations	Lockheed, General Motors, Microsoft
Publications	New York Times, The Economist
Institutions	University of London, Department of Transport
Retailers	Amazon, Marks and Spencer, IKEA

The origins of house style lie in the realm of printing, where newspapers and book publishers originally sought to establish guidelines for standardising their productions. The best known of these guides is Hart’s Rules, first written at the end of the nineteenth century for the Oxford University Press. In the twenty-first century, house style is also likely to include writing and presentation guidelines for what will appear on computer screens.

There are differences of approach in the rules of these various style guides. This should alert us to the fact that they are not only dealing with matters of fact and correctness – but are offering a series of conventions which should be followed by their authors.

They are likely to have policies governing such matters as

The notes given below provide illustrative examples. For detailed information on any topic, follow the links to the online style guides and the newspaper house style sites. Some of their guides are the size of small encyclopedias.

House Style – a real example

Microsoft’s Manual of Style illustrates the company’s rules for both print and screen writing, as well as their requirements for visual presentation and language use.

For instance, each topic they discuss is illustrated by an example of ‘Microsoft style’ and then an example of ‘Not Microsoft style’.

They also specify such fine details as how to present numbers; how to choose the names for toolbars and buttons; how to punctuate lists; how to size titles, sub-headings, and paragraph spaces; and where to use quotation marks.

The following is their table of contents for the topics covered in their house style guide – many of them in extremely fine detail.

Microsoft style and voice
Writing for web delivery
Writing for a worldwide audience
Accessibility issues
The user interface
Technical procedures
Practical issues of style
Grammar
Punctuation
Indexing and keywords
Acronyms and abbreviations

Style guides might now make distinctions between house style for print and for online purposes – because the two mediums are considered quite distinct, and may have different readerships and purposes.

Reading on a computer screen is more tiring than reading from a printed document. For this reason, style guides for digital use may specify shorter sentences and paragraphs, wider margins, and the inclusion of graphics.

House style manuals very often specify how the various departments and personnel in an organisation should be described. They are also likely to specify such details as the size and spacing of titles, headings, and sub-headings.

Spelling

Some words (in English) have more than one spelling. The term judgement can also be spelled judgment. House style rules help to create consistency throughout a document. And consistency is a key principle in creating ease of comprehension.

Newspapers also strive to use consistent spellings for foreign names such as Reykjavik (the capital of Iceland) and Nizhni Novgorod (a port in European Russia).

They are also likely to specify the spelling of names of important people – such as Ban Ki-Moon (Secretary General of the United Nations) and Aung San Suu Kyi (opposition leader in Myanmar – formerly Burma). This shows respect for the person.

American English and British English have minor differences in spelling, so documents aimed at both audiences need to be consistent.

British	centre, harmonise, travelling
American	center, harmonize, traveling

Printed style guides

This is a selection of book reviews featuring style guides published by a variety of organisations.

MLA Style Guide
English – Modern Languages Association – Academic

Microsoft Manual of Style
American – Microsoft Corporation – Business

The Chicago Manual of Style
American – Chicago University – Academic

New Hart’s Rules
English – Oxford University Press – Publishing

The Economist Style Guide
English – Economist Magazine – Journalism

Note of interest — it is said that the complete printed maintenance manuals for the Boeing 737 jet weighed more than the aircraft itself.

Vocabulary

The choice of vocabulary is important because it reflects the nature and the attitude of the organisation. The language you choose needs to be understood by the audience(s). It should be clear, unambiguous, and consistent.

It is now very common for organisations to specify the terms used to describe people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and issues related to gender.

For instance, the BBC specifies that people with learning disabilities should be used – not mentally handicapped. It specifies Muslim instead of Moslem.

The Guardian newspaper used to prohibit the use of the term regime to describe a government – because the term is clearly derogatory and suggests a bias against a government which might become legitimate in a few week’s time.

The Telegraph newspaper has a list of ‘banned words’ in its house style guide. These are not ideologically taboo words so much as lists of journalistic clichés used in tabloid newspapers – terms such as bloodbath, clampdown, jaw-dropping, and prestigious.

Online style guides

BBC News style guide
Detailed guidelines for print, online, plus radio and television broadcasting. Also includes rules on pronunciation and spelling of foreign names.

English Grammar
Comprehensive grammar guide, with downloadable lessons, interactive exercises, grammar checker, videos, and daily updates.

Purdue On-line Writing Lab
Purdue’s famous OWL, useful for general writing concerns, with links to American academic style guides and how to avoid plagiarism.

The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr.’s original 1918 classic. The ‘bare bones’ approach to common problems, with illustrative examples.

On-Line Study Resources
Style, grammar, essay-writing, citations and footnotes, plagiarism and presentation from the University of New South Wales.

alt.usage.english – Style FAQ
Mark Israel’s Frequently Asked Questions covers common English usage questions, word etymology, online and offline references, and more.

WebGrammar
Judy Vorfeld’s excellent site covers some of the most common writing mistakes, including spelling, grammar and homonym errors.

Capitalization

The correct use of capital letters is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. It is not always immediately clear if someone, somewhere, or something warrants a capital or not. The following are some of the more common instances.

days of the week	Wednesday, Friday
places	Scotland, East Anglia
rivers	the river Mersey
buildings	the Tate Gallery
institutions	the Catholic Church
firms	British Aerospace
organisations	the National Trust
months of the year	April, September

However, when such terms are used as adjectives or in a general sense as common nouns, no capital is required:

the King James Bible / a biblical reference

Oxford University / a university education

the present Government / governments since 1967

Capitals are used when describing intellectual movements or periods of history:

Freudian – Platonism – Cartesian – the Middle Ages
the Reformation – the Enlightenment

They are also used in the titles of books, plays, films, newspapers, magazines, songs, and works of art in general. The normal convention is to capitalise the first word and any nouns or important terms. Smaller words such as ‘and’, ‘of’, and ‘the’ are left uncapitalised:

A View from the Bridge
The Mayor of Casterbridge
North by Northwest
The Marriage of Figaro

UK journalism style guides

Financial Times Lexicon

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How to Make Money Scriptwriting

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guide to professional screen writing

This is the second edition of a very successful book which covers all aspects of scriptwriting (or script writing) and making a living as a professional author. It’s the work of a leading literary agent who brings insider tips and guidance on what is a tough market in which to make a living. Julian Friedmann takes a practical, no-nonsense approach which encourages would-be authors to become more aware of what he calls the ‘politics’ of writing. This means paying more attention to the market place; being prepared to fit in to the system of television or screen, and being prepared to deliver to audiences what they want.

He paints a picture of a very difficult business which makes big demands of the would-be screenwriter. The only way to succeed is be prepared to collaborate; drop your ego; know that viewer-ratings is All; and ‘murder your darlings’ when required.

There are excellent chapters on how to structure and produce a ‘pitch’, a ‘treatment’ and a ‘step outline’ for a proposed script. But even if you’re good at doing all that, there’s still more to learn: how script editing and script reports work; what ratings, audience share, and programme research mean; how to deal with an agent – or without one; how to handle meetings and negotiate with producers; how to understand a basic agreement and protect your own interests as a writer; and how to survive financially whilst you are waiting for that call from Hollywood.

The emphasis is almost entirely on cinema and television. There’s no mention of the theatre, and radio only gets a very brief mention, although there is one chapter on writing for interactive multi-media.

There’s also no advice on the details of writing techniques: he assumes you know how to write, or can find out elsewhere. His guidance is on how to make a success of scriptwriting from a business point of view. There are full explanations of all the people you need to contact; how to make your work look professional; and how to take rejection without losing heart.

He ends with a very useful series of appendices with includes examples of negotiations with producers; sample memos commissioning a deal; legal contracts; Writers’ Guild minimum Terms of Payment; plus all the contact details for writer’s groups, training courses, and professional associations.

Anyone entering this ferociously competitive field of creative writing needs all the help they can get. Friedmann explains why it is such a tough business, and in doing so he reveals the strategies you need to succeed. You will find advice on writing skills elsewhere. This is insider guidance on how the business works.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Julian Friedmann, How to Make Money Scriptwriting, Bristol: Intellect, 2nd edn, 2003, pp.219, ISBN: 184150002X

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How to publish your writing

October 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guidance and resources for writers

If you wish to publish your writing, you need to learn about the publishing process, marketing your work, and targetting your audience. The web pages listed here deal with all those topics – and more besides.

The writer’s marketplace
This is a selection of best-selling writer’s guides. These list all the information you need for contacting publishers, agents, and editors. They cover book publishing, magazines, newspapers, and specialist outlets for photographers and illustrators. Most of them provide mini-essays and tutorials featuring advice from professional writers.

Editing your writing
Guidance snotes on editing, re-writing, and creating structure – plus basic advice on topics such as sentences, paragraphs, headings, titles, punctuation, and spelling.

Publishing on the Internet
A selection of guidance manuals on writing for the Web – showing the special skills for creating readable web pages, plus writers’ groups and specialist outlets for creative online writing.

ePublishing and eBooks
Guidance manuals on how to create eBooks on a budget, using email as a marketing tool, plus writing in other digital formats. This approach takes the cumbersome and expensive printing costs out of publishing your work.

Writing for the Web
Three excellent guidance manuals on crafting what you write so that it can be effective when read on line. Writing for the screen is different than writing for print publication: these books explain the differences.

Writing for magazines
Writing for magazines is probably the most profitable form of authorship in terms of payment-per-word. But weekly, monthly, and specialist publications are often neglected as a possibile outlet by aspiring writers. This selection of guidance manuals show what markets are available, and how to break into them.

Writing for newspapers
Newspapers are the most difficult form of journalism for beginners to break into. And if you manage to get a foot in the door, you will need more than just writing skills. These manuals provide the basics of law, copyright, plagiarism, privacy, and the relationship between the proess and the public.

Publish your academic writing
Lecturers in further and higher education are obliged to publish their work if they wish to be promoted. It’s a very competetive environment. These manuals will show you how to convert a piece of academic work into something that can be commercially published. They also show the new possibilities of online publishing – or ‘open access’ as it is starting to be known.

Blogging – publish your writing
Blogging is a form of publishing open to everyone – no matter what the level of your writing skills. But if you want readers to come back to your blog pages, it will help if you know some of the protocols of good blog behaviour. These guidance manuals will show you how to set up a blog: it’s easy – takes two minutes. More importantly, they will show you how to craft even a short piece of writing so that visitors will want to come back for more.

How to write book reviews
One way to break into publishing is to review the books you read. You can post the results on Amazon or on book fan sites. It’s good practice at showing engagement with your subject. These guidance notes show you what’s required.

More on publishing
More on journalism
More on creative writing
More on writing skills

Publishing

books and resources on print and digital publishing

beginner’s guide to editing and re-writing

a selection of resources reviewed

Copyright links

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

complete guide to social networking

insider tips for putting academic writing into print

how change happens when people come together

an explanation and guidance notes

House Style – a real example

Spelling

Printed style guides

Vocabulary

Online style guides

Capitalization

UK journalism style guides

practical guide to professional screen writing

guidance and resources for writers

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