156: November Q&A

 

Welcome to the November Q&A episode! Topics discussed include:

  • formatting a quote 2:27

  • foreign rights 4:30

  • how to know when your manuscript is ready to query 6:35

  • how I decided to become a freelance editor 9:30

  • writing something else when querying 15:30

  • my process for dictating a scene 20:42

Mentioned in this episode: https://camosun.libguides.com/Chicago-17thEd/quotations

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NOVEMBER Q&A

Hi friend, welcome back to your big creative life podcast. I just had to start this episode over because I realized I was recording the video and not the audio. So take two of this. Welcome to our November Q and A episode. This episode really snuck up on me. I did not realize how far into November we were, and then yesterday, I was looking on my calendar, and I'm like, Oh, crap. We got to do a Q and A episode. Um, we're going to be traveling next week for Thanksgiving. We're going to Sam and Audrey and I are going to Minnesota.

 

We're going to be spending it with my family. And I'm feeling a little nervous aboutthe flight. This will be Audrey's second flight. Well, technically third, because we had the flight we went to Minnesota in July, so we had the flight there and back. But this is her second liketime flying on a trip, so I feel okay about it, you know, it's, she's 13 months. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. There's so many things that can play into how it goes, includingher nap schedule. We'll just have to see. But we do have direct flights, which is great. And the funny thing is, okay, so my brother and his girlfriend, they live in Minneapolis, and they're coming down to Charleston to visit this week. So they're going to be here Thursday through Monday, just visiting. I think that his girlfriend has never been to Charleston before, so we're going to do to all the touristy stuff. And then Monday, all of us fly back on the same flight to Minnesota, and then Sam and Audrey and I are going to be there through for like, five days. And we didn't plan it that way, that we are on the same flight, but it just worked that way, because there's not a ton of flights that go from Charleston to Minneapolis, but yeah, so that'll be fun, but wish me luck.

 

Okay, that's the big thing on the horizon that I'm thinking about today, but I'm alsothinking about our questions for our Q A episode. So let's dive right in. There are two questions I'm going to go through pretty quickly. Right off the bat, because I don't have a ton of information to share and answer them, but I do want to read them and acknowledge them that that the person that sent these in number one is,how do I correct How do I correctly source a quote from a public figure on the first page with permission. So I'm assuming that what this person means is, how do you like write the quote? How do you format it? Essentially, I'm assuming that's what you mean by sourcing a quote. And this seems like a straightforward question, but it's not a straightforward answer. Unfortunately, there are probably every style guide that you look at probably has different rules for this.

 

Chicago style is the onethat I follow, and honestly with if you're not putting it in the text, like if it comes in the text, then it's a different instance. And I can put a link to a guide that shows you how to do this in Chicago Manual of Style. But if the quote is just on its own, like, let's say you have your title page, then on the next page you have a quote that you want to put in there, and then on the page after that is chapter one, page one. Really the biggest thing I can tell you is to be consistent with how you do it, whether this is italics and then just an M dash underneath it, and then put the person's name. If you have multiple quotes, like, let's say, for example, you have part one, part two, part three, and before every part you have aquote, just make sure it's consistent. That's honestly the biggest thing.

 

I don't know if you are self publishing. I don't know if there's something special thatformatters do to format the quote in a self published book that's outside the scopeof my knowledge, so unfortunately, I can't really answer that, but yeah, I have worked on some manuscripts like copy edited them, where authors have done this, and that's what I check. I checked check to make sure there's not weird spacing, that it's aligned and that it's consistent, consistently written. So that's yeah, about all I can say for that, because otherwise it's hard to really give you a specific answer without being able to see it.

 

The next question that I have that I can't reallyanswer is, how do foreign rights work in the US? How to buy it? How much does it cost? This is something that just depends. Foreign rights are going to be very individualized depending on your contract. So my limited very limited. This is also outside of my scope of knowledge and expertise. So please know that with any information I'm giving you, but my understanding of foreign rights is that there's always a contract involved, right because it's a deal you are giving someone the rights to publish. Your work in the United States, or if you're in the US, you're giving someone the rights to publish your work in a different country. So there has to be some sort of deal, some sort of contract, in order to make that happen, and that's where all the financial stuff getsworked out. So it's just very individual. It depends on the contract. It depends if youhave an agent, or if you don't, if you're just doing it yourself, because if you have anagent, they'll take a percentage of that.

 

I believe it's actually, I can't remember what it is I have an agent, but we haven't had to deal with foreign rights yet, obviously, because I don't have a published book yet, so I don't know what percentage she takes. It's between 10 and 20% of what she takes for foreign rights, but I can't remember which is very industry standard, whatever, whatever my contract says. So yeah, unfortunately, I can't giveyou much more information about about it, because it just depends. But if you are querying, that's definitely and you get an agent, you end up getting a literary agent. That's definitely something that they'll have knowledge of and can walk youthrough. And if you are self publishing, if you're an indie author, and this is something that you're looking into, then I would bet there are resources online thatresources for indie authors that talk about this specifically. So I'm sorry I can't give you much more than that. I just know that it varies a lot. And if you think about anysort of deal, like any sort of book deal, it's gonna vary immensely. Any sort of financial numbers are going to vary based on previous book sales, based on the author's platform, based on the publisher, genre, all kinds of stuff.

 

Next question, how do you know when your manuscript is ready to pitch? So I am assuming this person means like, how when you're ready to query, because pitching is something slightly different. I mean, I guess it could be used in that you're including a pitch in your query. But I'm going to answer this as based off of you writing fiction, writing a novel, and wanting to query. So a couple of things I can tell you that are really important for getting your manuscript ready for this process. Number one is, have you done multiple rounds of editing on it yourself? This is not a first draft. It's not a second draft. You have done a lot of work on it to clean it up, not just polishing, like, word choice and punctuation and stuff like that, but like, have you checked to make sure that there aren't any really big plot holes, that the characters aren't lacking, that there's just nothing that happens in the second half of the book? You know, like, big, big stuff.

 

Have you done all that kind of editing as well as the little stuff? Next? Have you look at have you let someone else read it? This can be a beta reader. It can be just a friend. It can be a partner. I always talk about how I think it's best to get feedback from people who are readers and who aren't too close to you, because sometimes the people who are closest to us are a little bit biased, and they don't always want to give us honest feedback, because they because they love us and they don't want to hurt our feelings. But if that's all you have, that's fine. It's much better to have, I don't know, your partner read it than no one read it. So have you let someone else read it and then finally, check in with yourself, like do a gut check.Are your instincts telling you that you don't quite think it's ready? Maybe a little bit more work needs to be done on the beginning or the end or the whatever.

 

Then listen to that. Listen to that. But if you feel like you've taken it as far as you can, that's usually a good sign. Now you can definitely hire an editor, and I think that's a worthwhile investment if it's something that you can do, but if not, if you can't swing it financially, that's okay. That's where the Self Editing really comes in. And that's where look having a beta reader or someone else, look at it really comes in as well. So yeah, that's what I'd say. And in terms of pitching, if you mean like pitching in some other capacity, I guess I maybe the same things would apply, but, and the reason I'm specifying novel with querying is that the process works differently for nonfiction, so I'm not sure if, if this person's thinking about nonfiction,but in that case, you do essentially pitch your book like you come up with a proposal that's a lengthy document that kind of shows like, Hey, here's the book that I want to write, and then you sell that proposal, and then once you get the deal, then you actually write the book.

 

Okay, let me look at our next question. How did you decide you wanted to becomea freelance editor? I had kind of an interesting journey to this, because this is, this isnot something that I decided to pursue when I was young. It's not something I decided to pursue right out of college. It took a while for me to get here. I have a degree in English Lit, and I. I initially well for a little while in college, I was thinking that I wanted to become a book editor at like a publisher, but I took an editing class that was taught by a freelance editor and writer who highly discouraged us from pursuing that career path. He said it was very difficult to become a freelance editor. It was, dare, very difficult to become a book editor. There weren't many jobsavailable. He had to write on the side to supplement his income. And I believe thatwas all true for him. I don't think he was intentionally misleading us, but I do think that that was what year was that 2009 things have changed immensely since the internets and social media.

 

And so I, you know, it's just a different case now, but anyways, soI just didn't have i That scared me away from it, and so I decided not to pursue that, not to go down that road, which ended up being fine. It's, I'm glad I didn't, because I didn't want to move to New York. And you know, remote jobs were not a thing in 2009 it wasn't like I could have worked online or worked from home somewhere as an editor. Anyways. So anyways, fast forward to when I started writing. Pretty soon after I started writing, I started thinking about editing, and I started thinking editing, about editing in a copy editing capacity and a proofreading, proofreading capacity, first, because I had been a proofreader at a financial printing company before I went back to grad school, or before I went to grad school to become a librarian, and I had also always been proofreading and editing things for people, like resumes, applications, letters, just I was always editing stuff for people I had a really good understanding of grammar, a really good eye, that sort of thing.

 

So I took a training online, a class that I don't even remember it was something on,like Coursera, or I don't know, I it wasn't that great, so I don't That's why I don't publicly say what it was. I can't even remember who the person was that ran it. Butso I took a class, and I decided that I was gonna just take a stab at editing on fiber.And by that point, I had also been writing for a little while, and I'd gone through and provided feedback to people in my writing group, so I had, like, a decent understanding of story structure. I'd taken a lot of writing classes. That was a period in my life where I was trying to soak up as much knowledge as I could, and Ibeen a beta reader for people in a non paid capacity.

 

And so I started out on Fiverr and told people I was new. I'm like, hey, you know, this is, this is I'm new. I'm just building up experience here. And and then eventually transitioned off. And the reason that I really decided to pursue that is I was working as a law librarian. I was working at a law firm, and was not fulfilled. I was working in big law, essentially, not as a lawyer, just as the librarian, like I mentioned, and was like, Okay, what am I doing with my life? I'm helping attorneysmake more money. I'm not seeing that money. Law librarians are not paid anywhere close to what attorneys are paid. And also the law firms that I was working for, I worked for two before I finally quit and took my business full time.

 

You know, they weren't like doing, I don't want to say they weren't doing good work, but, you know, it's, it's big law firms, like they're not, I don't know. I just felt like I wasn't really doing anything meaningful with my life. And it wasn't something I was super passionate about. It was fine. It was definitely I enjoyed both of those firms that I worked out and I got to know my co workers, and I loved them, and so Ihad a good overall work experience. But I just knew, like in the, in the, in my heart, Iknew this is not what I was meant to do for the next, you know, 35/40 years. So I started looking at creating a business. I started looking at an online business specifically because I was just, like, seeing a lot of stuff online about this, and I had started posting on Bookstagram as well. I was pretty active there, and so I'm like, Okay, I know how to create content for social media.

 

Next question. Oh, someone said this into me. This one to me in a message, writingtips for when you are querying meaning, ways to stay focused on writing the next book, etc. Hmm, okay, this is a great question, because, oh, querying can be such a mind fuck. Forgive the language, actually. No, screw that. Don't forgive the language. It is a mind fuck. And that is the one of the biggest pieces of advice that I heard when I was querying is to focus on the next book, focus on the next project. It is very hard not to obsess when you're querying and to focus on something else. So I just want to affirm that if you are querying and you're having trouble doing that, it's normal, and I understand. I've been there. I think it's like when you're in that period of querying and you're trying to write something else is to give yourself extra grace, extra space and extra like, just self compassion and do what you can to make the process really fun.

 

Like, let me see if this is something I can do. And I started, I've talked a little bit about this before, but whenI initially started my business, it was way too vast. I wasworking with, like, all kinds of creatives doing all kinds of things. It was just a disaster. Didn't make any money,and then I finally built up enough confidence and some experience as an editor that I felt like I could actually work with writers and like, step out on my own and claim it. So anyways, that's what. Kind of led me down that road I've I've just been obsessed with books since I can remember, and this just kind of seemed like a natural progression for me with my skills and with myinterests, and I knew that I didn't want to work for someone like I didn't want to bean editor at an agency. I wanted to do freelance specifically and work for myself. That idea was very appealing to me so and now years later, here we are.

 

So if this means working on something that maybe easy, isn't even your next book, like the book that you want to get published, but maybe there's a short story you really want to write that's just fun, or, like a fan fiction you want to write. Or maybeyou are working on your next book book, but you're there's a scene that you've really, really bit excited to write. Let yourself do that. Let yourself focus on the projects that you want to focus on, instead of forcing yourself to write something inparticular if it doesn't feel exciting to you, particularly in that querying space, I think it's extra important to focus on things that feel good and feel fun, because then you're gonna be so much more likely to do them. I mean, I feel like that's goodadvice anytime, but just especially when you're querying.

 

Also what what can be helpful is to set time limits around what you are doing when it comes to querying, meaning like checking your emails, updating if you have a tracker or a spreadsheet where you're keeping track of which you should bewhen you query, of who you sent your book to their website, the email, etc, if you'reupdating that, like, whatever you're doing related to querying, give yourself a time limit. Like, okay, every day from 8am to 8:30am like, this is what I'm this is when I'mgoing to do my querying stuff. Maybe he's also researching other agents to query, whatever it is. You can also set a time limit on like your spiraling for querying.

 

So if you are very anxious and you're trying to write something new, but it's hard because your brain is just going and you're obsessing about querying, set a time limit, give yourself, let's just say, 10 minutes. Set a timer and let yourself stew, let yourself freak out, let yourself worry, let yourself do whatever you need to do to feel your feelings and freak out about the fact that you're querying, to stress about not hearing back yet, to stress about rejections, whatever, and then once that timers up, force yourself to move on. Because I think one of the hardest things with querying is it can be so tempting to just, like, push those feeling down, feelings down, and be like, No, I can't. I'm everything's fine. I'm just gonna focus on what's next and not it's just querying. It's fine.

 

But you have to acknowledge what you're feeling. You have to give yourself time to process it. Otherwise, you're never going to be able to move through it. It's just going to suck all the life out of you. So that's, I think, essential when it comes to querying overall, but it's also, again, it's going to allow you to focus on your next project, whatever it is. And sometimes, you know, we talk about focusing on the next book and but sometimes taking a break is the next right thing for you to do, particularly if you've been very stressed, if you're feeling burned out and you're like,Okay, this manuscript is finally ready to query. I'm sending it out there. I just need abreak. Please give yourself that break.

 

And really, I have an episode of the podcast that's about, I don't remember what the title is, but it's something to do with, like tips for surviving the querying process. So you can check that out as well. But yeah, otherwise, you know when it comes to getting yourself. To focus on whatever's next in terms of writing, a lot of the tips that I give for writing when you don't want to also can apply here, giving yourself rewards, celebrating your progress, having an accountability person that you can check in with, doing sprints where you only do 10 minutes, like all of those things can help when you're querying and having trouble focusing as well. So good luck. Itcan be really challenging process. But yeah, just think of like the 1000s of writers who have gone through this process. You know, you're not alone. That gave me a lot of comfort when I was doing it both times and having to go through it twice. Just was like, so horrible.

 

But I think we have just one more question. I did get a question from someone that I answered again, that I answered last month on the podcast about writing with brain fog. So definitely check out last month's podcast episode for the answer to that one. Okay, how do you dictate a scene? I love a behind the scenes for the process you use. Thank you. Absolutely. I would love to talk about this. And also just know that in December, I have an episode coming out that's a deep dive into this entire process of me writing my first draft of my book in 30 days. So I'll talk about dictation more in that episode.

 

So definitely check that one out when I whenit's released. But yeah, absolutely, I can walk you through what this looked like, because it it is kind of funny how muchof this book I dictated in the car, which I always feel like I have to give a disclaimerwhen I say that, that I was not looking at my phone while I was doing this. So I will give you a behind the scenes like glimpse of what this actually looked like. And because I was dictating, it was so hard for me to film like I couldn't actually film myself dictating because I was using my phone. I tried to do it a couple times with my iPad and then do a put that on social media for a piece of content, but it didn't really work out that great. I don't think so I can definitely walk you through what this looked like, and give you an example.

 

So I my daughter's daycare is dependingon traffic anywhere from 20 minutes to anhour away. It varies widely, and Sam and I switch off, who drops her off, who picks her up? But there are a lot of days where I drop her off, I pick her up. I'm in the car, right? So what this looked like is, I would get in the car, I would hook up my phone,Iwould plug it in so it charged. And then before I put the car and drive like when I'm still parked, I would open up my Gmail, and I would press the microphone button so that I could speak into it, and it would dictate it. It would type it. I know that there have to be I know that there are writing apps or dictatingapps that you can do, but this is just what I did. So just, this is my own process.

 

So I would open it up, Iwould press that microphone button, and then I would set itdown on my console, in by my what am I trying to say? Just set it. I would just set it down like bythe cup holders. Basically. Then I would drive and I would dictate. So I'm going to give you an example. I'm actually going to do this right now on the podcast and tell you what this would look like. Okay, so I've pressed the microphone button. Thegood thing about it is it doesn't like time out, so it's not like you have to talk right away. So I would take a second, I would gather my thoughts and then say something like, Okay, this is the part that I'm going to

 

dictate. Avery hated the Miami Heat. She didn't mind the palm trees, the sunshine,the Art Deco style, the fashion sense, but the heat was absolutely horrid. In fact, last summer, when she okay. So that's an example, just I'm making something up off the top of my head. That's probably not very good, but that's what I would do. That's about the speed that I would talk at, and I would take time to gather my thoughts, and if I got going, I would speak a lot quicker.

 

And then, basically, once I was done with the drive, I would just stop the microphone, and that would be it. And then I would copy and paste that into my Word document, and that way I could see how many words I dictated. And, yeah, that's that's really it. Sometimes in a drive, like, if I was in the car for, let's just say, 30 minutes, sometimes I could get, like, 2000 words dictated. It just depended on, kind of like, a regular writing session. It just depends on a lot of things, how motivated I am, if I'm stuck on something, if there's something I need to work out while I'm writing or before I'm writing it, that all just plays into it. But yeah, that's basically what it looks like for dictating.

 

It's you do have to go back and clean it up because dictating is not perfect, obviously, and doesn't include punctuation where there should be punctuation. Sometimes or it misunderstands something that you're saying so and it's all, it's not formatted, right? So it's all one big paragraph, but that's okay. It's something. And at the beginning, when I started dictating, I would go in and clean up after every single time that I dictated something, and then that just got to be too much, and I decided to wait until the end, to wait until the draft was completely done before I went back into clean up, because it just Yeah, it was too much to work on that while also trying to brainstorm and think about writing and all that. So that's basically what it looks like to dictate a scene.

 

Sometimes I would do that on a walk, like I'd have my headphones in, and I would just press the microphone on my phone and then put it in my pocket and talk, or prop it up on the stroller, if I was taking Audrey for a walk, and then talk into it. Yeah, that's basically it. But again, I'll have more information just overall, about the writing a book, a 30 days process, so I could talk about when I decided to dictate, and, like, why I decided to dictate and all that good stuff too. It's, I'm still shocked at the fact that I got the rough draft out in 30 days. And it would not have been possible if I if I was not dictating. Like, dictating saved me, especially because I have on those days when I drop her off and or pick her up, I just have more time in the car, and I felt like it was time that I could take advantage of, you know, I wasn't doing anything else.

 

I was like, listening to an audio book or listening to a podcast or music during that time. So might as well work on some writing. Okay, that is, let me just double check yes. Those are all of our questions for this month. If you have a question that you would like me to answer for the December Q and A podcast, you can submit it at the link in the description of this episode. Is a form you can just submita question you can ask about writing, editing, brainstorming, mindset, social media, content life is a mom, just whatever you want, and I'll answer it next month.All right, thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving week if you are in the US, and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf