If you thank someone by name in the acknowledgments section of your book, you don’t need permission because it’s probably a positive or neutral mention. If you want to talk about how your stepdad ruined your life, you’ll need permission because that’s negative. Seems pretty easy, but when in doubt, always ask permission. I’ll mostly be talking about negative mentions in this blog post.

There is a lot that goes into writing a book. Then, after you finish writing the book, there’s still a million more things to do! I hope this post will help you stay on track and take all the necessary steps to publish your book.

Congratulations on finishing a draft! Now, you know eventually you’ll need to hire an editor, but when will your book be ready for that next step? You’ll always find more things in your book to change, adjust, or fix, but how can you know when it’s time to hand it off to a professional? Here are 5 signs to help you know when you’re ready for book editing.

Introductions are a crucial part of most nonfiction books (and some fiction books). Introductions talk about the subject material and give the reader any background information they may need before diving into the book. This way, you can start chapter one with the actual chapter one content rather than explaining terms and concepts in chapter one needed throughout the entire book.

Point of view is the perspective from which the story is being told. Your choice of point of view can really change your story, so it’s important to make an educated decision. (This post isn’t going to go deep into all the points of view—because there are a lot—I’ll just touch on the top four most popular and most general.)

It’s very rare that someone intentionally goes out to exclude someone through their writing, and most people don’t mean to throw in sexist stereotypes when they’re writing a book. And yet it happens every day. . . . Why is this? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Most people don’t know the difference between proofreading and editing, but these services are very different. For example, they should be done at different times in the publishing process, they work with different kinds of files, and their scope of work is vastly different. If you’re unsure which one you need, read below to find out the difference between proofreading and editing.

You were probably taught this in school at some point, but it’s important, so let’s go over it again. Simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences are four basic types of sentence structure. Some people only know one or two types of sentence structure, which makes for really boring writing! It’s so repetitive!

Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

It may seem easier and cheaper to have an all-in-one editor, this way you get all the editing done in one go. Let me tell you why you shouldn’t do this.

Lists come up in writing all the time when you want to keep together multiple items. They can be made up of words, phrases, or entire clauses. For the list to make the most sense and flow well, each item in the list needs to be parallel to the others. This means each item of the list must make sense independently with the list introduction. That’s confusing. Here’s an example.

There are a lot of things to consider when hiring an editor, so here are eight tips to help you make the right decision.

Imagine someone telling you a story at a party. It would be a hilarious story—except that they suck at telling it. Their words are jumbled, and they’re so long-winded, and they messed up the punchline. It’s just a mess. This is what line editing fixes in your story.

Overwriting often happens with amateur writers. New writers think they need to explain everything to the reader for them to understand. This means there’s lots of meaningless description without much progression of the story. The reader is pulled out of the story and gets bored! So, let’s learn how not to do that!