Bits and updates

Happy Friday! I’ve got a few interesting bits and updates from the past week-ish.

As I mentioned on Facebook, I have an immediate editing slot open for a completed, unpublished novel, preferably romance. (I read historicals, the occasional paranormal, and contemporary romance; my past fiction work is all contemporary fiction, romantic elements optional.) Hit me up! The newly updated Rates page now includes pricing for fiction under 40k words. Quotes and sample edits are always available for novel-length works.

If you’re working on a NaNoWriMo novel: YAY!! Go you!! But hold that thought re: getting it edited. I’ll have a post up tomorrow talking about why.

My post Don’t get suckered: National Association of Professional Women went up almost three years ago and still draws comments from women who say that NAPW is up to the same tricks. Journalist Nikki Gloudeman’s new post at The Establishment, Anatomy of a Scam: The National Association of Professional Women, is a deep dive into the experiences of former members and whether they think membership is worth it (spoiler: no), who exactly runs the organization, what it’s like to work for NAPW (spoiler: awful), and what the future holds. My post is linked in the piece, and I chose not to be interviewed for it because anxiety gets the best of me sometimes, but nevertheless, this is an excellent piece. Recommended reading.

Lighter recommended reading: this Tor.com post on How Huge Door-Stopper Fantasy Novels Get Made, with plenty of photos showing the hard covers getting foil stamped, the pages being printed and bound, and the cover and dust jacket added. (You’ll have to add your own somnolent How It’s Made narration.) The post returned to me the term signature. Presses like this one print books in signatures, or chunks, of 32 pages. A half-signature is 16 pages.

If you’ve ever read a book that had a bunch of blank pages or an unexpected Notes section at the back, it’s probably because there were pages left in the sig or half-sig, so the publisher either left them blank or added the Notes heading. The pricing of a print run is also based on how many signatures each book will take to print. Months ago, I read some romance-related post (at Cooking Up Romance? Smart Bitches Trashy Books?) that wondered why category romances run exactly 192 pages, and I can tell you: it’s because 192 pp = 6 sigs. If a book ran even a page longer, it’d cost more to print; much shorter, and you’d have to argue to call it a novel, I suspect (back-of-the envelope calculation puts 192 pp at 48k words). But at the time I could not for the life of me remember the term signature. Now that I remember, of course, I don’t know where I read the question. (I ran into the other room and shouted at Matt, “Signature!! The word is ‘signature’!” He was just confused. It didn’t help either of us.)