What does professional even mean nowadays?

When someone talks about a persion doing a professional job, typically they mean that 1. the person is experienced, and 2. the person is familiar with and works according to the standards and practices in the industry.

Of course, all "professional" really means is, the person got paid.

How are the professionals doing with e-book formatting? Well, according to this (note PDF, non-PDF excerpt here), the answer is pretty badly! The gory details:

In recent days, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs was removed from the iBookstore and replaced with a new version because of formatting errors. One iBookstore reviewer wrote: “I want my money back. The formatting errors in the iBooks version are appalling. At first, a caption is missing or just a word, but it soon becomes illegible. The publisher should be ashamed.”

Similarly, the Amazon Kindle release of Neal Stephenson’s eBook Reamde recently made headlines because line breaks, missing passages, and hyphens preceding words such as “people” and “couple” were scattered throughout the eBook. One Amazon reviewer wrote: “…the reading experience is fatally tainted,” and demanded a full refund of the $16.99 price.

Think about that the next time someone tells you it's worth it to pay them $3,000 to format an e-book, because they are going to take good care of you--you can't even trust the large publishing houses (charging $17 a copy!) to do a decent job.

No matter if you hire someone (and you can do that for much, much less than three grand) or do it yourself, you need to read over the e-book before you publish it. And you can do that pretty easily even if you don't own an e-reader, just download Mobipocket reader to your computer to read a Kindle file, or Adobe Digital Editions to read a Nook file.

I know I've made this analogy before, but it is really just like dealing with a car mechanic or a home contractor: If you have no idea what the person is doing and no intention of checking the work, you will have no way of judging whether the fee charged is fair or if the work was done well. In other words, you will get screwed.

Book lengths

I'm doing a little housekeeping today--getting rid of inches and feet and the like. I ran a word count on Trust--it's about as long as Trang, a little under 110,000 words.

It's funny because with all the reading I've been doing lately, I've noticed that an awful lot of these books come in at, oh, about 30,000 words. Science fiction tends to clock in with six-figure word counts anyway, so I don't worry about mine (I have no idea how you'd keep a sci-fi book to 30,000 words, unless you were writing something like a Star Trek or Star Wars novel where you don't have to bother with all that pesky world-building).

Nonetheless, on a purely practical and commercial level, there's good reason for you to keep your books short, even if I don't: They take a lot less time to write, so you can crank out a lot of titles.

The problem with longer works is that they take an exponentially longer amount of time to write. I used to be a business reporter, so I will give you an example of a short literary form that I am very well acquainted with: The earnings brief.

These clock in at less than 100 words and go something like this:

GinormoMegaCorp reported sharply lower profits on increased revenues yesterday. Profits for the last quarter, ending October 31, were $5 gazillion, down from $6 gazillion the same quarter the previous year. Revenues, in contrast, were $85 bazillion, up from $70 bazillion in the quarter ending October 31, 2010. Company executives attributed the lower earnings to additional expenses stemming from the merger of Ginormo Corp. and Mega Corp. two years before. Shares in GinormoMegaCorp closed at $15.65 on the New York Stock exchange yesterday, a drop of 4 percent.

So, that's 88 words, and it took me four minutes to write. If I was writing an 880-word imaginary feature on GinormoMegaCorp (which is a longish feature, a little more than 20 inches of newsprint), it would take me considerably longer than 40 minutes to write, even if I were to make it all up.

That's because a feature ten times longer than an earning brief is far more complex. With the brief, I can just plug the numbers in and add a one- or two-sentence explanation of why a company is making more or less money. A feature requires an actual story line--I'd need to figure out what I'm going to say about the troubled merger between Ginormo and Mega. Structurally, I'd need a good lede, a paragraph summing up whether people think GinormoMegaCorp is going to succeed or fail, another paragraph noting that it might do the opposite, and then lots and lots of detail (in this case, a lot about what the hopes for the merger were and why it's not happening yet), ending with a nice concluding paragraph that sums up everything beautifully and will be cut for space.

It's the same thing going from a 30,000-word novel to a 100,000-word novel--in all likelihood, it is going to take more than three times as long to produce the latter. You've simply got more to keep track of (and if you feel like you don't, you seriously need to take a hatchet to that mother).

Finding a proofreader

Despite the visiting relative (who went home yesterday), I actually have been making progress. That's the benefit of realizing I have many small things to do along with the really big things--when I found myself with some random spare time, I was able to get things done.

Specifically, I was able to hook up with a proofreader! A friend who I used to work with in publishing recommended him--he mostly works for a mainstream book publisher, which I think is a good sign, because in my experience they take proofreading quite seriously. So I mailed the Trang layout to him.

I felt that his proposed fee was quite reasonable, but when I mentioned it to someone I know from writers' group, they were astounded at how cheap it was. Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems to me that this proofreader has set up his business the same way I did when I was a freelance writer--if you're fast (which I was back in the day--fast and efficient, if you can believe it), you can charge a high-enough hourly rate to make a good living, but since any given job doesn't take that many hours, you're still not expensive to your clients. That way you offer a good value, and you build a solid client base because people will come back to you and recommend you to others. This is one of the reasons I'm so skeptical of people offering really expensive services to writers--I don't look at the price tag and think, "Gee, you must be really good!" I think, "Gee, you must have to make money fast before the suckers wise up!"

Climbing up that learning curve

OK, you know how when I was trying to figure out how to put a table of contents in an e-book, and it turned out that it was easy to do--as long as you downloaded the right software and got comfortable editing HTML?

Well, tonight I decided to tackle including the front cover art. And, gee, yes it is easy, assuming you download Mobipocket Creator and get comfortable creating a MOBI file. Of course, that only takes care of the Kindle. Smashwords claims that if you just add an image to that Word file they insist on, you'll be set--I guess we'll see once they finish processing it, but if that's true, they get ease-of-use points for both the embedded cover art and the table of contents. [ETA: It's true! Point to Smashwords!] Nobody seems to know how to do it for the Nook.

Seriously, if anyone is ever wondering why not all e-books have all the bells and whistles, it's because IT'S A PAIN IN THE ASS. Actually uploading your book file is relatively easy (deceptively easy in Amazon's case, because it turns out that the Word-to-Kindle conversion is far from perfect), but the rest of it? Let's just say that, while I am comfortable using software, I never had any ambitions to actually go mucking around in its guts. And yet, here I am. I guess this is growth.

P.S. Oh, and allow me to roll my eyes, because the cover won't show up in Amazon's preview tool. Again, it works with Mobipocket, so I can only hope it works with a Kindle.

Gah

So, I was like, Why don't I fix that pesky table of contents issue? That shouldn't take too long....

TWELVE HOURS LATER

OK, so it didn't take twelve hours, but it took a lot longer than it should have. What really took the time was just figuring out how the hell to do it--really and truly, and I say this as somebody who wasted a great deal of time trying to do it some other way, the only way is to download an HTML editor and take it from there. You need what are called anchor tags. If you download NVU like I did, it's super-easy, and the anchor tags are represented by cute little cartoon anchors. If you try doing it some other way (and really, the coding is no harder than what I use in this blog, so you should be able to), Kindle won't convert the code into an actual link. Instead, it will just leave the code there, because I'm sure readers are dying to learn about The Amazing Adventures of Href.

To complicate matters and increase author stress, neither Kindle nor Nook will show a working link in the preview. With Nook, you can download the final ePub version and check that, but with Kindle I have no freaking idea if the links in the table of contents work or not. They work in HTML. That much I know.

I just skipped Smashwords this time around because they want you to upload Word documents, and I have NO idea what would come out the other end if I did that. (ETA: Score one for Smashwords! They automatically create a linkable table of contents if your chapter heads begin with the word "chapter," as mine do. Definitely a good idea!)

In terms of things that took about as long as I thought they would, I downloaded some stock photos I can use to cobble together a new cover. I did hear back from that artist--he's going to think it over and get back to me reasonably soon. The thing is, one of the blogs agreed to review the book, and Norwescon is coming up, which hopefully will drive some traffic to Trang, so I think it's worth it to throw something together just for the e-books in case getting real cover art takes longer.

And although I didn't get any actual editing done on Trust, I woke up this morning with a great idea for the opening paragraphs just complete in my head. I love when that happens.

A whole new world

So, Joe Konrath's most recent blog post is about his experiment with dropping the price on one of his books to 99 cents. It's fascinating.

OK, it's fascinating to me, the ex-business-reporter weenie. What's really fascinating is that Konrath is dealing with a buying public whose behavior he can't predict--that's why he has to conduct these experiments. Will e-book buyers act like regular book buyers? No one knows!

One thing is obvious: Book publishing is in the midst of enormous change. Thanks to new technology, e-books and even print-on-demand books are really cheap to produce. This is hurting traditional booksellers (which shouldn't shock me: I used to work in the encyclopedia industry, which was basically eliminated by first CDs and then the Internet). Writers, however, can make money--Konrath reports that he is making $187 a day off his 99-cent book, which is on Amazon, which isn't exactly going under selling 99-cent books, either.

Which is why stuff like this is so off the mark--this person, who no big surprise, sells services to self-published writers, thinks that to be "competitive" you have to cough up more than $40,000 to produce a book.

Let's turn our heads away from the fact that, duuuude, if you want people to buy stuff from you, you're opening line should not be, "Wanna go bankrupt?" Let's ignore the fact that you can spend all the money you want on a review package, and the major media outlets still won't review a self-published book. And let's not focus on the fact that people like Konrath and Karen McQuestion have done very well for themselves spending waaaaaaay less than $40K.

Isn't that $40K in start-up and promotion costs exactly what is wrong with traditional publishing?

I mean, let's say it's really vital to me that I break even on Trang (it's not). Given my start-up costs and that ad I bought, I need to sell, what, 450 copies of Trang to make back that money? Compared to 20,000 copies if I were "competitive"? With that kind of spending, it's no wonder a writer at a major house will not get a new contract if their sales are south of 30,000 copies.

Who the fuck am I supposed to be "competitive" with here? And what am I competing for? If the competition is to avoid Chapter 11, I'd say I'm already ahead. If the competition is to, I dunno, outsell J.K. Rowlings or something--with my non-commercial science-fiction book that lacks an alpha-male hero and features lots of bad language--then what I really need to do with that $40K is to plow it into therapy in hopes that one day I will become less delusional. Or maybe I pile it up in my back yard and set it on fire--that would work about as well, and I'd get more enjoyment out of it.

Anyway, yes, I need to stop reading provocative blog posts and get to work on Trust. That "something" I was coming down with is apparently a sinus infection, though, so we'll see how productive I am....

Some interesting blogs

So, I still don't love Twitter, and yet I am finding it extremely useful. I'm following the Twitter feeds of some people who are interested in self-publishing. Not shockingly, it turns out that most people who are interested in self-publishing are interested in making money from it, and not necessarily by writing self-published works--they want to sell services to writers who want to self-publish, which obviously doesn't automatically make them dodgy, but it pays not to be too trusting.

Nonetheless, they are, indeed, following trends and stories and offering advice and whatnot, and through them I have found this really interesting blog by Joe Konrath, who is a traditionally-published-turned-self-published writer. He's also an evangelist for self-publishing (especially e-publishing), but what's nice about him is that he's willing to talk numbers and even conduct experiments in pricing with his own books to see what happens. His openness has allowed another blogger interested in e-books named Dave Slusher to write this analysis of how Konrath's can optimally price his books to maximize revenues. So that's all pretty cool, and very informative and useful to authors considering self-publishing in this day and age.

Counting the costs

The new layout of Trang has been accepted, and I have ordered the proof. Barring any major problems, both editions of Trang should be available for sale soon!

I feel like a big reason to have this blog (other than the fact that if I don't report to somewhere, I tend to stop working) is to present my experience to people who are thinking of self-publishing so that they have a realistic idea of what it involves.

Obviously, a major barrier to getting anything published is cost. Not because you should be paying fake agents or sleazy editing services, but because when you are writing for publication, you're not earning a paycheck. For a first-time novelist, you need to have the novel done and ready for publication before you can get an advance (which isn't really an advance at all by that point); for a nonfiction writer, you need to have a very detailed proposal with sample chapters. Both take a lot of time, and putting that stuff together while earning enough money to not starve to death is a major challenge.

And then there are the specific costs involved in actually getting a book out. Not that my finances are anyone's business but my own, but I was a business reporter after all, and I thought it would be helpful to actually inventory what I've spent so far--the start-up costs, as it were.

Of course, LJ doesn't make it easy to format columns. I had to do it backwards, and it's still not quite right.

So: What did I have already? A computer, Internet access, and Microsoft Word. (I don't try to figure out the cost of paper and ink, because I'll use the same toner cartridge or paper ream for several different projects.)

Spent on creating marysisson.com:
$67.50 for 5 yrs....Cost of domain name
$226.79 for 2 yrs.....Cost of Web host*
$294.29.....TOTAL

Spent on creating e-books:
$0

Spent on creating hard copies:
$355.00.....Purchase Adobe Acrobat
$17.86.....Purchase initial Trang proof
$9.91.....Purchase revised Trang proof
$16.24.....Purchase large-print proof
$78.00....Fee for improved price/distribution (both books)
$477.01.....TOTAL

GRAND TOTAL: $771.30

Which, you know, ain't exactly peanuts. Obviously it's cheaper to just produce e-books. That said, I only had to purchase Acrobat once, and it's going to be five and two years before I have to pay to keep up the domain name and Web site, respectively. There will be a reoccurring cost of $10 per year to maintain the improved price and distribution for both hard-copy editions of the book. (You can see from the difference in price between the initial and revised proofs the kind of hunk that fee takes out of the cost of the book both to me and to readers.)

How does that compare with the cost of trying to get published traditionally? Well, from 2005 until 2008, I spent $427.56 on postage alone--and I know that's not all I spent, because I was sending out Trang in 2004. (This is why crap like "Send me your stuff so that I can reject it and feel important!" pisses me off.) And you know, at least now I actually have a book, which is more than I had before.

* Edited March 30, 2012, to reflect rate change.

Agents

Since I'm writing about traditional publishing paths (and not doing my layout--bad! bad!), I thought I would touch on the subject of agents. I have had three, and obviously, I have not been published, so you might expect me to be all angry and bitter about them. And there have been ups and downs--my brother once offered to beat up one of them for me, which is certainly the first time he's ever done that. But honestly, I really appreciate the agents I've worked with--they gave me a tremendous amount of support and intelligent feedback, they gave me copious quantities of their time and expertise, and they genuinely shaped my nonfiction project.

And none them ever saw a dime for it. I can point you to Writer Beware's section on agents and to Absolute Write's Bewares, Recommendations, and Background Checks thread, and I can tell you to check agents out on Preditors & Editors, but the basic rule of thumb in sorting reputable agents from the other kind is: They don't get paid until you get paid. Up-front fees = SCAM!! SCAM!! SCAM!!

Real agents take a percentage (usually 10-15%) of the money a publisher pays the writer. So, do a little math there, and you'll see that an agent is not going to be interested in a small-press book. A small press might pay a $2,000 advance--that's $200 for an agent taking a 10% fee. A large, commercial house, in contrast, will be paying more like $20,000. That's $2,000 for the same amount of work. Large houses won't consider a writer who doesn't have an agent; small presses avoid dealing with agents like the plague because they're just not on the same page, budget-wise.

So, you notice how those three agents gave me their blood, sweat, and tears, and made a whopping $0 for their trouble? That's the problem with new writers--they are less likely to sell. So if you are a new writer looking for an agent, you need to be prepared to deal with a LOT of rejection (and to spend a hell of a lot on postage sending out either finished manuscripts if it's fiction, or detailed proposals with sample chapters if it's non-fiction).

Many agents simply won't represent new writers--which is fine if they're willing to admit that up front. When I first started looking for an agent, I found lists of agents that allegedly were willing to represent new writers. I would send them my manuscript Priority Mail, with a stamped, self-addressed, Priority Mail return envelope. Priority Mail takes two to three days to go one way. Many times, the manuscript would be back to me with a rejection notice five days after I mailed it.

Now, I know agents all say that they carefully review everything they get, but who are they kidding? I used to screen stories: I'm a fast reader, but there's no way in hell you're getting through that many manuscripts that fast if you're actually reading them. Why waste my time and money? Just say you don't represent new writers and save yourself a truckload of mail every day.

So I was already pretty annoyed when I went to a convention for science-fiction writers, sat in on a panel about finding an agent, and listened to a narcissist tell a room full of writers that we should all pay to send her our stuff for the 0.05% chance she might represent it. That really irritated me, and later in the conference I mentioned that to one of the other panelists. She said, Yeah, what you need to do is to check out Locus, which is basically the Publisher's Weekly of fantasy/sci-fi, and look at the new book deals. If you see an agent who has represented a new writer, that's who you contact.

And that's what I did. It worked great--it got me in contact with that honest agent, who was also an extremely prestigious guy. Obviously, he didn't feel my sci-fi novel was commercial enough (and once he gave me the key to the code, I realized that that was what the other agents who actually read it were saying as well), but he suggested that I try to cook up a non-fiction book.

So I did. And he liked it! He really liked it! He REALLY, REALLY, REALLY liked it!! Except at this point I was noticing something a little worrying about the guy. He was really, REALLY UP!!! one week, and really, REALLY DOWN!!! the next. I honestly don't know if he was a tad bipolar, or if he was just struggling between feeling enthusiasm and going, Oh, fuck, a new writer! but I've tried dating guys like this, so I knew where it was going to go. And sure enough, one day his random mood generator swung very low indeed, and he told me he couldn't represent me.

But he'd coaxed this awesome book idea out of me and helped me develop this awesome proposal for it, so I was really thankful for that, and I felt well-prepared to go find another agent. The only problem was, I wasn't looking for someone to represent a sci-fi novel any more, so Locus wasn't going to help. I poked around and poked around, and I finally found Agent Query, which in my experience is the most up-to-date listing of agents. If AQ says that an agent takes new writers and represents X kind of literature, that's usually in fact the case--not always, but often enough that I didn't feel like I was flushing money down the toilet every time I did a mailing.

And I found another agent! And she was awesome! She was an editing whiz (agents in general have great ideas on how to market books, while writers tend to focus very narrowly on the book itself). By the time she was done with it, that proposal was beyond awesome--it was staggeringly good. Unfortunately, she'd been having family emergencies all along, and she decided to retire. But, being awesome, she passed the proposal along to another agent--this guy was so far up into the stratosphere that I never would have made it onto his desk without her help. And he LOVED it!! And he submitted it to publishers with great enthusiasm!

And it didn't get published. Yeah, there's not a nice, neat happy ending here that you can tie up with a bow. The thing is, getting an agent is like buying a lottery ticket, if buying lottery tickets were really, really hard--if you had to pass a test or something, you couldn't just walk into 7-11 and pay a dollar to get one. Once you have the ticket, there's no guarantee that you'll win.

But frankly, I wouldn't have the confidence to do what I'm doing now if it weren't for these agents--there's nothing like being told you are good by people who work at the very top of the industry to encourage you. At least one of my books-to-be would not exist in the first place if it weren't for these agents. And while I know that "It's about the journey, not the destination" is a cliche, developing yourself as a writer is indeed a quest. Rewards like publication (assuming that even qualifies as a reward) aren't really the point.

This is a public-service announcement

I just want to post a link to Writer Beware's page on print-on-demand services. In general, if you are hoping to get published, you should acquaint yourself with Writer Beware and the Absolute Write Water Cooler forum, because there are a LOT of scams out there. (The worst was when I had to explain to some lady that the writing "award" her daughter won was actually a pretty common scam. That was just awful, even though they wisely hadn't paid the scammers any money, because she was so proud of her daughter.*) I mean, yes, I am self-publishing and producing a print-on-demand book, but you'll notice that it's been quite a bit of work. I'm also (and this is key) not expecting to make any money off it. Seriously. I mean, it'll be nice if I do, but I'm not in any sense betting the farm on it. I also don't mind if I alienate traditional publishing houses by producing a POD book--I'm pretty much fed up with that world, and I'm in a position now where I don't have to care.

But while I don't have to make money on my books, I also don't want to lose a lot of money, and I really don't want to get ripped off. So I have done my homework regarding things like rights, and of course a major part of the appeal of Amazon for me is the fact that it includes a distribution channel. I also am willing and (more or less) able to do things like the layout, which has brought my costs down to the price of Adobe Acrobat (and I know there are cheaper PDF converters and editors out there, I'm just not technically adept enough to figure them out). The main costs for me have been 1. my totally optional Web site, and 2. my time.

Another, not-insignificant reason for me to do it myself is because there are a host of people out there looking to take advantage of would-be writers. I've seen enough to not trust the people who say, Hey, gimme a big wad o' cash, and I'll turn YOUR book into a STAR! The pitch may be, I pay you, and you'll do the art. But will it be good art? Or are you relying on me being a rube who doesn't know the first thing about how a book ought to look? Let's just say that I've seen enough crappy expensive professional layouts that I feel OK if mine is crappy but free. (Of course it's worth it to pay for what you know will be good quality--I was more than willing to pay 11th Hour to do my cover art, but alas the talented artists tend to be really busy.)

As much as the scams/bad values are an issue with art, they're an even bigger issue with editorial. Editorial services are basically a rip off--even if the person improves your writing greatly, they cannot possibly guarantee publication, and given the rates they charge.... I mean, for Christ's sake, my super-duper, fanciest-of-the-fancy-pants, his-client-list-would-BLIND-you agent couldn't get my nonfiction book published. Someone who advertises in the back pages of Would-Be Writer's Monthly isn't going to do you any better.

I think it's totally worth it to work on your writing and become a better writer, and that's pretty hard to do if you're not on staff at a publication and constantly getting feedback from editors. But it is possible to do, and to do much more cheaply, by joining writer's groups, submitting your materials to workshops, taking writing classes, learning grammar, and even just reading and watching stories critically, with an eye to their structure and figuring out what works and what doesn't. And, you know, don't be an idiot--check out people's qualifications. If you're being asked to shell out for a workshop, find out who the hell is going to be looking your stuff over, and why the hell you should listen to them--don't just cough up hundreds or even thousands of dollars for editing services by Promises-Promises, Ltd.

*ETA: You know, what's really evil about this kind of thing is that, for all anyone knows, that lady's daughter is indeed a great writer, or could become one. If they aren't working in the industry and aren't surrounded by people who are very frank and know what they're talking about, writers don't get a lot of meaningful feedback or affirmation. So to receive this kind of affirmation, but then to discover that it is a fraud--well, it was pretty brutal for the mother (I knew it was going to be, but I felt like I had to tell her, because the alternative was to have people ripping her off every time she turned around). I'm sure if she passed the news along to her daughter, it was pretty damaging to her confidence as well. It was just an evil thing to do to them.

Ghost rules

Everyone (well, everyone I know--my social circles are admittedly very heavy skewed to the language geeks) is loving this article in Slate about how you shouldn't use two spaces after a period. (I will to add to that article an economic argument, which I would bet is the actual reason typographers adopted the one-space rule: Using two spaces after a period means you use more paper, and paper ain't free.)

What really strikes home in this article (and REALLY bothers the author) is how sure people are that there is a two-space rule when there is none:

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the 'correct' number of spaces between sentences.... Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space 'rule.'

This avid belief in rules that do not, in fact, exist is common (and I would argue more harmful) in grammar as well. Grammar education in this country is horrible: When I was attending my (crappy) secondary schools, most years the English teacher would one day say, "OK, we're going to start the unit on grammar!" And the kids would say, "GRAMMAR!?!?! Oh, NO!!!" and the teacher would say, "You don't want to learn grammar? OK, we'll skip that unit." (Imagine how much fun it was to be an English major at Harvard University and then to break into the field of publishing on that kind of sound educational footing!)

Anyway, given this attention to grammar in our public schools, if you ask the average American to name a rule of grammar, they will likely respond with one of two rules, neither of which actually exist.

Ghost Rule #1: Don't split an infinitive. Um, why not? "To boldly go where no man has gone before" sounds a lot better than "To go boldly where no man has gone before" or "Boldly to go where no man has gone before," and it doesn't affect the meaning one bit.

Grammar rules, believe it or not, tend to make logical sense and clarify meaning: You don't say "John and me went to the store" because you wouldn't say "John went to the store, and me went to the store," and you say "I ate only one slice of pizza" because that's all you ate, and "I only ate one slice of pizza" implies that your interrogator is wondering if you, I don't know, had sex with your food first or something. If a grammar "rule" doesn't makes sense or help with meaning, then it's not actually a rule--it may be a preference, but it's more likely a ghost.

Ghost Rule #2: Don't end a sentence with a preposition. Again, there's no real reason not to if it makes your sentence clearer and more concise. It can be more casual, although the fixes aren't necessarily more formal. Which leads me to an inappropriate joke (told to me by my late father, the source of roughly 90% of the inappropriate jokes I know):

A fellow is touring the Princeton campus when he stops an undergraduate. "Hey, where's the library at?" he asks.

The undergraduate pulls himself up stiffly. "Sir," he replies, with great disdain, "here at Princeton University we do not end our sentences with a preposition!"

The man nods. "OK," he says. "Where's the library at, asshole?" 

To take that fix more seriously, the real problem with "Where's the library at?" is conciseness--that extra "at" at the end is unnecessary. But that's not always the case, and pretzeling a sentence around to avoid violating this "rule" can result in horribly awkward prose that was best mocked by Winston Churchill in his famous comment, "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."

That link will take you to a whole slew of ghost rules for grammar if you want more. What really bothers me about ghost rules is the underlying assumption that grammar is arcane and arbitrary, a collection of mysterious, upper-class, Victorian-era, etiquette-type rules that ordinary people can't possibly understand and won't have much use for. The truth is: Grammar makes sense. It tracks logically, it helps you say what you mean, and because it is so logical, it's easy to understand. It's worth learning because it helps you to communicate to others--and that's well worth doing.

Oh, right

It occurred to me that instead of simply telling you that I know all about loose lines, stacks, and widows, I might actually try to (gasp!) serve the reader, specifically the self-publishing writer thinking of doing their own layout, and let people know what these things are.

This is going to be a little weird, because LiveJournal doesn't exactly support reams of formatting options (or maybe it does--I haven't figured them out, though). But bear in mind that typically in a book the text is justified--it all lines up on both the right and the left, unlike here, where they only line up on the left, and LJ disregards all my attempts to get them to line up on the right.

Justification causes problems because sometimes you've got too many words in a line, and sometime you don't have enough. A loose line is caused when there aren't quite enough words in a line so it looks all spread-out and weird. (Oh, I tried making that line loose, but LJ is ignoring me and my extra spaces.) Alternately,youmighthavetoomanywordsinaline,andtheygetallsmushedtogether. Logically enough, that's called a tight line.

A stack happens when you have three or more (two is OK, don't ask me why) lines that end in the same word or, more commonly, in a hyphen. A paragraph with a stack in it looks like this:

He enjoys hik-
ing, bike rid-
ing, and canoe-
ing.

Note that I got stacks on both sides of that paragraph! Bonus hideousness! Tight and loose lines are hard to read; stacks are just ugly and distracting.

The example paragraph above is also bad because it has a widow. A widow is when you have a line that's just a little word fragment, like that "ing" all by itself up there.

Wanna start a fight among book designers? Ask if a small word--not a fragment--counts as a widow, and then stand back and watch the fists fly.

It doesn't affect
readability, but
many designers
think this looks
ugly.

Others think it's not worth the trouble to have to fix every last one of those.

Another thing I didn't mention before are bad breaks. That means that a hyphen has been place in a word in a way that is, well, bad.

It could be bad because it's incorrect (the dictionary is your friend here):

He enjoys bi-
king.

Or it could be bad because there's already a hyphen in the word, and now you have two:

Those worries are not well-found-
ed.

Or it could be bad because the page ends on a word break, and the reader has to turn the page to get to the next syllable.

As much as you can, you want to break compound words where the two words attach: train-spotting instead of trainspot-ting. Also, you typically don't want to break a small word--for example, video--even if it's two syllables, because the resulting fragments are really tiny.

There are lots of ways to fix layout problems. Obviously if it doesn't matter to you, you could always edit the text itself. Designers aren't allowed to do that, and of course altering text to fit space hardly ever results in the best prose choices. Instead they have to noodle with the lines themselves, bringing down a word (usually there's some kind of soft return/text wrap break option in the software) or breaking words with a hyphen to bring a syllable down or up (watch for stacks!). There's also something called kerning, when the software will squish together or spread apart the letters themselves, but you have to be very judicious in your use of kerning, because otherwise it looks like you suddenly changed fonts in the middle of your story.

By the by, if all of this sounds really focused on small details, it is. Cover art and chapter headings can be beautiful, but a good book layout is supposed to make reading easier, so you really only notice if it's not there.