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Tips for Grassroots Publishers - Davis
A Book Proposal
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Tips for Grassroots Publishers by Scott C. Davis
128 pages typeset, 43,000 words
How-to.
Based on the author's experience with Cune Press 1994-1998Author's statement: "A practical guide for artists, writers, students, businessmen, do-it-yourself family historians, memoirists, and all others interested in putting their art and writing into print and up on the web."
Point of this book: "As a novice publisher I appreciated Mark Ortman's book A Simple Guide to Self-Publishing. Unfortunately, no one had written a comparable simple guide concerning line editing, copy editing, and desktop prepress production.
"I realized that the quickest way to learn to line edit, copy edit, and desktop publish one's work was not to read three dozen thick books, as I had done. These books were made unnecessarily long by publishers who wanted to extract $40 from buyers. Nearly all the information they provided was beside the point. By giving the reader too much too soon they made the process of publishing seem more complicated than it actually was.
"The easiest way, I realized, was to start, and and to learn by doing. Tips gives readers essential information needed to produce their own art and writing with annotated reading lists for those who want more background."
Comparables: "A Strunk and White for desktop publishers."
Companion volume: See proposal for Literary Entrepreneurs, a book which gives the "big picture," and is intended to complement Tips with its focus on nuts and bolts.Previous critical success: The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community (Kentucky, 1987) won the Washington State Governor's Award, was featured on All Things Considered, praised by the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal, was reviewed by a dozen urban dailies, and was accorded large feature articles by the Richmond News Leader and the Seattle Times.
Introduction
Writing Sample
(Excerpted from Tips for Writers: Simple Steps to Increase Your Communication Skills.)I spent 30 years learning how to write and speak with clean, efficient, elegant words. I have distilled what I learned into a few simple rules. I originally developed these rules to help me compose nonfiction prose and have found them widely applicable to any medium or situation where I rely on words to communicate.
Why Words Are Important
We work for hours or days on our projects: a paper for school, a proposal at work, a talk to a volunteer organization, but we normally don’t realize that the beauty of our ideas is lost on our audience. Why? Because of many small imprecisions in the way we use words. In other words, the Fuzz Factor. We may resist critiques of our word usage because we feel that it is who-we-are that is the object of criticism. Not so. What need correcting are mere technical mistakes that are easily remedied once they have been spotted.
How to Use "Tips"
I suggest applying one tip every day as you read the newspaper, listen to your boss, or wade through a memo at work. Make it a habit, a game. You will quickly see the errors of others and more gradually learn to identify and correct your own mistakes. As you become more articulate in your writing and speaking, your thinking will improve as well. Good words allow us to be more logical, more incisive, more compelling. Words can convey emotion and insight. They are also tools that give us power.
—Scott C. Davis
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to purchase Tips for WritersAuthor's Bio
Scott C. Davis supports himself as a building contractor in Seattle. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.
Davis' first two books The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community (Kentucky) and Lost Arrow and Other True Stories (Cune) won the Washington State Governor's Award and the King County Arts Commission Special Projects Award respectively.
Davis is the founder of Cune Press and the editor of An Ear to the Ground: Presenting Writers from 2 Coasts.
Cover | Skills | Essays | Travel | History | Fiction | Poetry | Reviews | Ordering | Books Online
English from the Roots Up is a Cune Press bestseller. It lists 100 common Greek and Latin root words and shows how they are used to build words in English. The key to understanding most long English words. Widely used in home schooling and to prep for SATs, this book is also an effective tool for writers who want to sharpen their command of English.For more info click on the "Bookshop" button above.
© Cune 1997. Note: All images in this publication are copyrighted by the artists.
All articles are copyrighted by the writers.
All Cune interviews and other unsigned material is copyrighted by Cune.
