by Karen Smith | Apr 29, 2025 | Blog
“Gatekeeping” is typically a claim made by authors who resent being urged to hire professional editors, designers, and graphic artists to produce quality books. They view the reading public’s expectation of and demand for quality as prohibitive and...
by Karen Smith | Apr 15, 2025 | Blog
I came across a solicitation seeking an skilled writer to produce “awesome,” SEO-optimized blog posts of 650-700 words each. Count me interested. What subject? What’s the production schedule? What’s the pay? The potential vendor was offering...
by Karen Smith | Apr 8, 2025 | Blog
Spring in southwestern Ohio is notoriously wet and the weather unpredictable. Last week, we got three inches of rain last week. Monday morning, I woke up to snow. My poor magnolia! With nearly 10 inches of rainfall thus far this year, my yard and pastures are …...
by Karen Smith | Mar 31, 2025 | Blog
Publishing is an unregulated industry, thus rife with bad actors and scams. Authors who don’t exert the effort to educate themselves fall prey to predatory practices and find themselves out of a lot of money. Follow the money The first rule of publishing is to...
by Karen Smith | Mar 25, 2025 | Blog
A potential client recently accepted my offer to provide her with a sample edit. I received the first 1,000 words of her manuscript and dug in. The first three paragraphs dwelled on world-building, expository description of the protagonist’s immediate...
by Karen Smith | Mar 11, 2025 | Blog
The cognitive dissonance is real. A barrage of celebratory posts and posts decrying rampant misogyny and more posts about wokeness erasing women from language and law heralded International Women’s Day (March 8). It reminded me of two things: 1. Take Back the...
