The Oxford Comma

You may have heard the term "Oxford Comma" and thought to yourself, what is that crap all about? Here it is.

The Oxford Comma is the last comma in a list and is placed right before the conjunction. Consider the following sentence: Tom went to Austria, Poland, and Belgium. The comma after "Poland" is the Oxford, also called serial, comma.

But Stu, why should we use it? Hipsters never do and that's considered "grammatically correct!"

I'll give you a few great examples. What if your list isn't of perfectly related items? Consider the following:

Johann came to the party with the two hookers, Washington and Jefferson. No Oxford comma. Still grammatically correct. See the problem? Johann might have shown up with 2 people or he might have brought 4. If he brought 2, he will be introducing you to two hookers, of which their names are Washington and Jefferson. Uh oh. If he brought 4 people, two of them happen to be hookers and the other two are esteemed presidents of the United States. Sweet.

Consider that same sentence WITH the Oxford comma: Johann came to the party with the two hookers, Washington, and Jefferson. That comma makes the sentence very clear. Under no interpretation did Johann screw up and bring hookers named Washington and Jefferson. Get ready to have a pretty fun party.

Attention Beta Readers!

Instead of emailing a ton of beta readers and compiling edits / thoughts / comments in that manner, I thought it prudent to post short excerpts from upcoming projects here so everyone can comment in one location.

If you want to read The Goblin Wars Part Two: Death of a King, click here.

If you want to read Melissa's Heart, click here.

Also, don't miss the new review of Necromancer, one of my all-time favorites. 

The issue with self published books......

Firstly, I'm not going to say that all self-published books are terrible. They aren't. That being said, I have read a decent amount of self-published authors and have found a common theme in the bad ones. 

In one word: editing.

Editors can be expensive. A good editor can charge up to $10 per manuscript page. For an unpublished author with a novel around 60,000 words, that's nearly $800 in editing charges. Of course, that's on the expensive side. Cheaper editors come in around $1.50 - $2 per manuscript page. As with most things, you get what you pay for. 

Why do self-published authors need editors so desperately? Credibility. If you know you are reading a self-published work and find a single typo, you are more likely to disregard the entire book as sophomoric and unworthy of your time. Is that judgement unfair? Yes, but that's a discussion for another time. 

Also, editors do so much more than just turn a giggling stomach into a jiggling one (one of my actual edits from For We Are Many). I'm currently reading a self-published and entirely unsuccessful sci-fi novel. Hidden beneath all of the formatting errors and other issues lies a great story. Trying to slog through the novel is turning out to be a real chore - despite my enjoyment of the plot and characters. The paragraphs are often confusedly organized and I've never before read a novel with parenthetical sentences every other page. Those are all issues an editor could have cleaned up and the end result would have been a solid sci-fi I would recommend to friends.

In closing, if you are attempting to self-publish, get a budget. Plan on spending about $500 right out of the gate to make your story into a masterpiece. Set $150 aside for a cover illustration, $200 for editing and proofreading, and $150 for marketing and ordering paperbacks. That may seem like a massive amount of money, but you don't see investors sinking 20 bucks into the stock market in hopes of making millions.

Imaginarium Recap

This weekend was the Imaginarium Writing Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. What a blast! I got to meet a ton of my favorite authors and guys I've seen at other conventions around the Midwest. We had a launch event for a few Hydra books including For We Are Many and I think the Hydra booth outsold all others over the weekend. I look forward to attending next year!