Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was an earlier draft of Mockingbird that was published in July 2015 as a sequel.
Copy editing is the process of revising written material ("copy") to improve readability and fitness, as well as ensuring that a text is free of grammatical and factual errors. The Chicago Manual of Style states that manuscript editing encompasses "simple mechanical corrections through sentence-level interventions to substantial remedial work on literary style and clarity, disorganized passages, baggy prose, muddled tables and figures, and the like ". In the context of print publication, copy editing is done before typesetting and again before proofreading. Outside traditional book and journal publishing, the term "copy editing" is used more broadly, and is sometimes referred to as proofreading; the term sometimes encompasses additional tasks.
Standard manuscript format is a formatting style for manuscripts of short stories, novels, poems and other literary works submitted by authors to publishers. Even with the advent of desktop publishing, making it possible for anyone to prepare text that appears professionally typeset, many publishers still require authors to submit manuscripts within their respective guidelines. Although there is no single set of guidelines, the "standard" format describes formatting that is considered to be generally acceptable.
In publishing, a slush pile is a set of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts that have either been directly sent to a publisher by an author, or which have been delivered via a literary agent representing the author who may or may not be familiar to the publisher. The responsibility of sifting through slush piles is usually reserved either to editor assistants or to outside contractors called publisher's readers or "first readers". If the reader finds something of interest and can convince a senior editor to accept it, they may earn credit.
Edward William Garnett was an English writer, critic and literary editor, who was instrumental in the publication of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.
A literary agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers, film producers, and film studios, and assists in sale and deal negotiation. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwriters, and non-fiction writers.
The Crime Writers' Association (CWA) is a specialist authors' organisation in the United Kingdom, most notable for its "Dagger" awards for the best crime writing of the year, and the Diamond Dagger awarded to an author for lifetime achievement. The Association also promotes crime writing of fiction and non-fiction by holding annual competitions, publicising literary festivals and establishing links with libraries, booksellers and other writer organisations, both in the UK such as the Society of Authors, and overseas. The CWA enables members to network at its annual conference and through its regional chapters as well as through dedicated social media channels and private website. Members' events and general news items are published on the CWA website, which also features Find An Author, where CWA members are listed and information provided about themselves, their books and their awards.
Novel & Short Story Writer's Market (NSSWM) is an annual resource guide for fiction writers that compiles hundreds of listings for book publishers, magazines, literary agents, writing contests, and conferences. NSSWM is published by Writer's Digest Books and usually hits bookstores around August of each year.
Alice Dalgliesh was a naturalized American writer and publisher who wrote more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books, mainly for children. She has been called "a pioneer in the field of children's historical fiction". Three of her books were runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the partly autobiographical The Silver Pencil, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.
The School Story is a children's novel by Andrew Clements, published in 2001. It is about two twelve-year-old girls who try to get a school story published.
A publisher's reader or first reader is a person paid by a publisher or book sales club to read manuscripts from the slush pile, and to advise their employers as to quality and marketability of the work. In the US, most publishers use a full-time employee for this, if they do it at all. That employee is called an editorial assistant.
Edward Longstreet Bodin, better known as Ed Bodin, was an American literary agent, columnist, mystery writer, and politician who founded the Spiritual Party as a platform to run for President of the United States in the 1952 presidential election.
Killing Time is a science fiction novel by American writer Della Van Hise. Part of the Star Trek: The Original Series franchise, it was published by Pocket Books in 1985. The original manuscript had Kirk/Spock slash fiction elements, and these were requested to be removed by Paramount. However, they were not removed, and 250,000 copies were printed. These romantic undertones between Spock and James T. Kirk were brought to the attention of the office of the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, who made Pocket Books recall the first edition. This edition subsequently became a collector's item, with more than fifty changes made to a revised version.
Mohammad Shaheen has been a professor of English literature at the University of Jordan in Amman, Jordan since 1985. Shaheen holds a PhD degree in English literature from Cambridge University. He is the author of many books, including E.M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism.
Open Letter Books is an American publishing house based at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. It was founded in 2008 by Chad W. Post, the Editor-in-Chief of Dalkey Archive Press. It specializes in translation, a less-populated field in American publishing.
An authors' editor is a language professional who works "with authors to make draft texts fit for purpose". They edit manuscripts that have been drafted by the author but have not yet been submitted to a publisher for publication. This type of editing is called author editing, to distinguish it from other types of editing done for publishers on documents already accepted for publication: an authors' editor works "with an author rather than for a publisher". A term sometimes used synonymously with authors' editor is "manuscript editor" which, however, is less precise as it also refers to editors employed by scholarly journals to edit manuscripts after acceptance.
Developmental editing is a form of writing support that comes into play before or during the production of a publishable manuscript, in fiction, non-fiction, and academic writing. As explained by Scott Norton in his book Developmental editing: a handbook for freelancers, authors, and publishers, developmental editing involves "significant structuring or restructuring of a manuscript's discourse". Developmental editors are a type of language professional.
A manuscript is the work that an author submits to a publisher, editor, or producer for publication. Especially in academic publishing, manuscript can also refer to an accepted document, reviewed but not yet in a final format, distributed in advance as a preprint.
Philip Nichols was an evangelical writer from the West Country active in the reign of King Edward VI. He was born in Ilfracombe, north Devon and he held property in south Devon. He was a client of the Protestant gentleman Sir Peter Carew and shared his patron's enthusiasm for reformed religion. In 1548, he made his modest reputation by publishing an open letter to Richard Crispin, a canon of Exeter Cathedral who had denounced Martin Luther in a sermon at Marldon on 24 March 1547. This letter, very polite by the standards of early modern religious controversy, aimed to prove that the Bible is the principal "touch stone, or triall" of whether religious teachings are true or false. On the accession of Queen Mary I, Nichols fled into exile, joining a Protestant colony at Aarau. He returned to England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and unsuccessfully attempted to lobby Sir William Cecil to step up the pace of religious reform. Between 23 November 1562 and 22 June 1564, he held the living of Rimpton in the Diocese of Wells. The date of his death, like the date of his birth, is unknown.
Between 2016 and 2021, multiple prepublication manuscripts were stolen via a phishing scheme that investigators believed were conducted by an industry insider or insiders. In 2022, the FBI arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old Italian citizen living in London and working for Simon & Schuster.
