Correct punctuation? Are you serious?!

Correct punctuation gives you a head start!

Sorry guys -- we're deadly serious here. If there's one thing that will jump out of your manuscript in the five seconds after an editor first looks at it, that thing is bad punctuation. Three errors on page one, and page two won't even be glanced at.

Correct punctuation has not always been a tool writers had at their fingertips. For the first several thousand years after writing was invented, nobody bothered to even separate words with spaces! If you've seen an example of ancient Greek, you might wonder how anybody ever read it:

LEFT: a page from a Bible dating from around Year Zero. They were written in ancient Greek in those days; the original Hebrew texts are much older ... and you don't want to know how hard it is to read those! RIGHT: the Ancient Greek language, like any written language, gets even 'worse' when it's scrawled by hand! You would wonder how anyone made sense of this.

As you can see at a glance, correct punctuation starts with ... nothing. An empty space. Specifically, the spaces we insert between words. If not for a pinch of punctuation (that is, if we were still writing like the Ancient Greek scholars) this paragraph would look like this:

There's a reason people invented punctuation. There's a reason we still use it! And good writers accept the challenge of learning correct punctuation, for extremely sound reasons.

You want people to understand your writing. You don't want to be misread, misquoted ... or not read at all, because some people don't understand a word you're saying and others take one look at your work, see the absence of correct punctuation (put another way: too much wrong punctuation, or none at all!) and don't buy your book.

And if your ambition is to not only get paid to write but to actually write for a living, it's all about selling your work. You can always park your stories in website archives, invite people to come in and read, and bask in the knowledge that you're being read, and some people send nice emails. It's true, many writers never go any further than this; they have no professional aspirations. But if you want to write professionally ... give up the day job and earn a living by writing, you must write well. Sorry: there's no other way but to learn.

Fortunately, correct punctuation is easy to learn. Once you know the rules of punctuation, and the rules of grammar, you'll have such a head start over 90% of your competitors, you're already halfway through the literary agency's door.

So let's look at the rules of good ... correct! ... punctuation. Let's get some simple ground rules down. Once you have this foundation installed, you can build the mansion on top.


Turn page to Punctuation made simple!

Freelance editing is an invaluable skill

It's never too early to begin the process, and when you're just setting out to work as a freelance editing is a job you probably won't be able to delegate. Professional services abound. You can easily find one ... but they can be very expensive.

A bureau will provide several levels of service. A 'light' edit, followed by various degrees of thoroughness. At the end of the process you should have an error-free manuscript. The downside is, you could easily have paid a couple of thousand dollars to a reputable freelance editing service. As an aspiring professional yourself, you need to think about the investment, weighed against the potential ROI, or 'return on investment' you expect to make. In other words, your royalties.

Every publisher seems to have a different way of figuring out how much to pay for a book. They know their markets; they know how much advertising is going to cost; they should have a good idea of how many copies of your book they can expect to sell. They may have staff to pay and a large office to keep up; they might also have taken a loss on a recent book, where sales were unexpectedly poor. They also might outsource to a freelance editing service, in which case, they pay the fees.

All these, and many more factors are used to work out how much a writer will be paid for a work, as a new freelance. Editing will be done at the publisher's cost, and this also will be factored into the royalties equation. (The more editing you need, the less you'll be paid.)

If you're able to get a contract with a large publishing house, of course you'll be paid correspondingly more than if you make your debut with a small publisher. The more major the publisher, the bigger the 'engine' driving the process of publishing and distribution. And if they have to outsource freelance editing, they can more easily cover the costs.

If you're pretty sure you can get a sale to a major publishing house, paying for editing services might be within your budget; go with a good 'jobbing' freelance editing service, because downtown bureaus can have fee schedules that'll make you blanch.

A point to consider is that you'll probably need a literary agent to make the breakthrough with a major publisher. Your agent's fee will usually be 15%. If your freelance editing service's fee was in the regions of $2000, for an in-depth, meticulously thorough edit of a long (or longish) book, you can cover both of these fees out of a $10,000 income from the book, and come out of it with a tidy sum.

But do be reasonably sure you can make the sale to a major house. Most writers make their professional debut with a small publisher (even writers like James A. Michener, and J.K. Rowling had to 'get in via the backdoor' of small publishers).

The 'problem' of small publishers is, their printruns are small, and your royalties will be lower. If you receive $5,000, the agent's and editor's fees won't leave very much as a gratuity for your efforts. Sure, you can work your way up the ladder to bigger printruns and higher royalties, but it takes time (you progress at your publisher's speed, which can seem glacial at times!), and ... being blunt about this, wouldn't it be nice to earn some money right now? Money saved is money earned. It's a sound idea to become familiar with freelance editing.

If you can master the skills of freelance editing yourself, you have a big advantage. At the very least, you can do four-fifths of the editing work before you have a professional editor look at it. The less work they have to do, the faster they'll be through your manuscript. You might be 'on the clock,' or you might be on a flat, scheduled fee. Either way, the less your freelance editing guru needs to do, the less you'll be out of pocket!