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“For me, and other ‘first timersâ€� [debut authors] I’ve spoken to, the primary concern is whether the story is good enough. With your first book there is no objective bench-mark you can judge it by. I felt very protective of the first draft; are people going to laugh when they read it or just shake their head? It sounds strange but the book was part of me. (Jon Gliddon interview on sevencircumstances.com)”
― Jon Gliddon, Break in Communication: Raid on Porthcurno Telegraph Station, Cornwall during WWII

“I think of book development like cooking spaghetti. There are many ways to cook it, but the basic ingredients should be present: The pasta, and the sauce, and the cheese topping! If you’re a fabulous cook, and you plan on selling spaghetti to earn extra income, it should be obvious to you that there are a lot of other places where it is sold, and you would have to convince people that your spaghetti is better than the others. You’d do this by making sure that the noodles are perfectly al dente, the sauce is tasty, and to give it an edge, you’d make it cheesier, put it in a nice container, and maybe add a sprig of parsley on top to add to the appeal. You wouldn’t serve it on the floor and tell people to go on and taste it because it’s truly delicious, and that you have slaved for many hours perfecting the taste.

Packaging and appearances are important, as much as the taste. In publishing, you could be the next great writer, but if you don’t present your words in the most appealing way possible, especially in this highly competitive industry, I doubt anyone would bother to read it except your friends and family, if at all.”
― Eeva Lancaster, Being Indie: A No Holds Barred, Self Publishing Guide for Indie Authors

“Editing a written text is a collaborative enterprise that commences with the other parties commenting up the author’s initial ideas and it can include technical assistance in correction of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, poorly structured sentences, vague or inconsistent statements, and correcting errors in citations. Editing is as much as an art form as writing a creative piece of literature. A good editor is a trusted person whom instructs the writer to speak plainly and unabashedly informs the writer when they write absolute gibberish. Perhaps the most successful relationship between a writer and an editor is the storied relationship shared by Thomas Wolfe and his renowned editor, Maxwell Perkins. By all accounts, the prodigiously talented and mercurial Wolfe was hypersensitive to criticism. Perkins provided Wolfe with constant reassurance and substantially trimmed the text of his books. Before Perkins commenced line editing and proofreading Wolfe’s bestselling autobiography Look Homeward, Angel,â€� the original manuscript exceeded 1,100 pages. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Thomas Wolfe declared that his goal when writing “Look Homeward, Angel,â€� was “to loot my life clean, if possible of every memory which a buried life and the thousand faces of forgotten time could awaken and to weave it into a â€� densely woven web.â€� After looting my own dormant memories by delving into the amorphous events that caused me to lose faith in the world and assembling the largely formless mulch into a narrative manuscript of dubious length, I understand why a writer wishes to thank many people for their assistance, advice, and support in publishing a book.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An ISBN is assigned to each specific format of a book and never reused. Like golf, the rules are made-up and simple, but can be misinterpreted or applied incorrectly.”
― David Wogahn, My Publishing Imprint: How to Create a Self-Publishing Book Imprint & ISBN Essentials

“POD books are like snowflakes. Every book can be a tiny bit different.”
― David Wogahn