Summary: If you've managed to complete your manuscript, congratulations! That's a major achievement, and you deserve to celebrate. Once you've finished the champagne, it's time to switch hats and convert your opus into a product. Don't know where to start? Freelance editor and typographer Dick Margulis can help. Dick's first editing job was chief copy editor for his junior high school newspaper (unpaid, of course)46 years ago. But his interest in typography predates that by a couple of years. He got serious about it in seventh grade. In the intervening decades, Dick has been a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker (yes, all three) and, along the way, has had paying gigs as an advertising copywriter, a magazine columnist, a book editor, a technical writer, a marketing writer, an herbarist [sic], a Web designer, a compositor, a lithographer, and a few other things he's already forgotten. But through it all, he has remained true to his passion of clear communication through careful editing and appropriate typographic design. Join Dick and Writing Show host Paula B. for a most enjoyable discussion about post-writing tasks, including: * What you need to do after you've finished writing your book * How a manuscript and a product differ * Why you should get someone to edit your work * What an editor does * Why writers shouldn't take suggestions about their work personally * What writers and editors should expect from each other * How editing fiction differs from editing nonfiction * Why you should ignore what your English teachers told you * What book design is and why it's important * How graphic designers and book designers differ * What factors book designers have to consider * How books are printed * What it costs to print books * What the lead time for getting your book produced is * When the busiest times for printers are * What a proofreader does.
