Is Grammarly Good Enough To Edit A Book Manuscript?

So the ability to edit does exist but it is the meta-level of interest to me. For example, does knowing one can fix it later make one a sloppier writer? Or does it take the pressure off and thus allow for more creativity? I am not a writer but this is interesting to me as to the psychology of writers.

HarperCollins does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. No matter how much you beg, they just won’t do it. It’s not personal, it’s just a matter of logistics. They’d be submerged beneath the tidal wave of manuscripts that would pour in were they to open up to unsolicited work. Your best shot is to get yourself an agent who can make sure your work gets in front of the right people. On the rare occasion when HarperCollins does have an open submission period, you can follow them on Twitter for the announcements – a golden ticket to consider.

Actually, Y’s ending is far better than I expected. It’s a beautifully bittersweet ending to a rather amazing comic. If you want to read other comic books with brilliant recontextualising endings which also leave you gasping at how emotional they are, The Sixth Gun by Cullen Bunn is an excellent supernatural western, with a deep and complex story and ending which was superb. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa is another excellent comic that ends in a really profound and moving discussion of family and legacy – really unexpected but somehow great. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is another very powerful story about finding humanity in very inhumane situations. A girl growing up in Nazi Germany becomes human to the narrator, Death, in a very powerful and life affirming way. The novel’s end is very, very sad but in a good way and I think it makes the novel as a whole very powerful. Finding such great payoffs in comics is rare and when you do, you have to appreciate them.

Ugh, indentation chaos. Some paragraphs are displaying huge tabs, while others appear to have no indentation at all. In some cases, the spaces between words are rendering as little square boxes instead of normal space characters. This sort of problem is a sign that your document was created using a bunch of random space and tab characters as opposed to CSS styles for paragraph indentation. For the reader, it can be a problem to work around, but in most cases toggling the “Publisher Font” on and off will reset the paragraph to its proper formatting. Also, if you change the font size up or down by one notch, the text will reflow to proper indentation in most cases. But, oh, the page will look awful in the meantime. This kind of problem is a sure sign that the author did not hire a professional to format the work, and makes me worry about the quality of the editing as well.

The majority of formatting problems that arise with eBooks arise from conflicts between an eBook’s CSS styles and the eBook reader’s default styles. Open your EPUB in an editor (such as the built-in editor in Calibre), open the eBook’s CSS file and simplify it by removing all declarations with ‘!important’ from them. Set the body margin to zero. Define a solid font-family stack. Make sure all your measurements are set up in ‘em’ or ‘%’ rather than fixed ‘px’. Because a Kindle book is read off of screens of varying sizes, using relative units to measure rather than fixed pixels is key to fix formatting issues such as having every other paragraph centered for no apparent reason as I encountered in my last upload.

I have to admit that I saw the beginning of the twist, but had no idea how it would actually play out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Bishop, but the rest of the plot was completely surprising. The twist was so clever because it outsmarted me when I thought I had finally outsmarted it. But James, the author, played fair. Upon re-reading the events leading up to the twist, I realized that each step of the killer’s plan had a vulnerability and that Grace found a way to exploit each of them. It was like watching a Jenga tower collapse, piece by piece. The ending was very narratively satisfying in that it was a cascade of all of the vulnerabilities being revealed one by one. But, the book didn’t end there. We got to experience the messy aftermath of the killing, the legal implications of the impersonation and the emotional fallout. It was all very real.

I generally verify the titles of popular books such as “The Good Wife” written by Stewart O’Nan (2008) as the book most commonly referred to by readers whereas the legal drama TV series “The Good Wife” was written by Robert and Michelle King. To find this book, try searching library catalogs and bookstores for Stewart O'Nan + The Good Wife (Add the year 2008 to narrow search). If your possible edition lists a different author or is a translation, I can try to verify with any given text or character. It’s fun to hunt down “different” versions of a title. It’s almost like a reader’s detective work.

As someone who has done a lot of formatting of book pages for manuscripts and print ready PDFs, I can say that there is nothing more annoying than a wonky margin, a line of text that splits to a new page unexpectedly, or a font that just doesn’t look right. Most of these problems are simple to fix if you check the basic settings first. So, check the size of the pages you are using. Are you using 6×9 for trade paperbacks, or A4 for your docs? Also, check for ‘keep lines together’, ‘prevent widow orphan pages’ and similar options in your word processor. These are often found in the paragraph formatting options for Word and Google Docs, and can be toggled on and off to test their effect. There are times, however, where more serious reformatting is called for. This can include troubleshooting consistent font display or unGhosted hyperlinks. It’s rare that I’ve had to convert a file to a ‘clean’ format in order to allow reformatting from scratch, but such has been the case with both Word .doc and Google Doc files. Once in plain text (.txt) these can be reimported into almost any program. For eBook reformatting, however, I use the wonderful free software, Calibre, which also allows for reformatting of EPUB errors. For print, it’s worth noting that InDesign’s ‘package’ feature creates a zip file including all used fonts and linked graphics – which is very handy when distribution to printers/copy shops etc. It’s also very simple to have a second pair of eyes scan a test print for subtle errors such as: over running headers to the bottom of the page; and images bleeding into the gutter. It’s a little puzzle, but ultimately very rewarding when sorted.

A look at some apps to use for editing on the go on Android and iOS. Android: Lithium (reading + light note taking that feels like editing). EPUBEditor (direct HTML editing). BookFusion (decent cloud-based annotations that sync). Totally Books (iOS-only: metadata edit for EPUBs). Textastic (iOS-only: code editing that opens up EPUBs via cloud). MWeb (iOS+Android+web: superb Markdown editor that exports to EPUB). Sigil (web: gold-standard desktop editor for EPUBs. There may be a lite version accessible via remote desktop apps on mobile, for the hardcore “I can do that on my phone” kind of person). Unfortunately, no single app yet covers all bases. Currently I use Lithium for reading and quick fixes, and a text editor for all more serious work. As mentioned, currently the e-book ecosystem is highly fragmented and whilst each app provides excellent functionality in isolation, currently there are no ‘out of the box’ solutions that cover all bases for serious e-book development work. However, there are enough apps in the eco-system to create a personalized solution to suit individual needs and workstyles.

I’m really interested in novels where someone is called a ‘good wife’. This opens up so many different themes. The biggest thing is role versus self. What does a good wife do? How do good wives support careers and secret passions? Then there’s social pressure to appear a certain way and how reputation affects the wife of the house. And, more economically-minded, marriage as partnership versus as a means to survive financially as a woman, and the aspect of class that plays into that and affects a wife’s autonomy. I generally approach these novels looking for more insight into how they can be feminist or not, in a largely unobtrusive way. The use of secrets to expose society or to shock the reader is also something that I find interesting. Often a legal/political sub-plot is created in order to highlight the larger implications of the personal choices of the protagonist, and other novels focus more on domestic realism and use each detail to increasing emotional affect. These details can stay with you long after the end of the novel, so it’s worth paying attention to even the smallest of domestic details.