What Are Your Words Worth?

What Are Your Words Worth?

Indeed, that is the question that was on my mind when I started this business one year ago. What are your words worth? I imagined myself asking potential clients during 1:1 meetings in coffee shops around North America. Are they worth the little it will cost to have something you will truly be proud of?

The thought that I could help university students write solid research papers is what motivated me to - pardon the cliché - start this journey. The idea that I could help budding authors fulfill a dream of writing a book introduced a new path. The understanding that I could help anyone losing sleep at night because of writing revealed to be numerous trails I could happily traipse.

The fact is this: everyone who writes needs an editor. Whether the work requires serious content editing or just a few syntactical corrections, that second set of eyes is of fundamental importance to the quality of any piece. Our Facebook and LinkedIn business posts should be treated with the same level of care as the abstract of a grant application or the introductory paragraphs of a dissertation because our success hinges in it. It's my dream - again, pardon the cliché - to help anyone who is willing to reach out for help.

I'm Leanne Whiffen with Your Words' Worth. I help writers of all skill levels avoid stress and frustration by working with them from start to finish.

Comments

What Type of Editing Service Do I Need?

All writers need the services of an editor. No matter how good they are, or believe themselves to be, they are guaranteed to make mistakes. This is much more likely to happen when the creative juices are really flowing and their hands can’t keep up with their brains. Yes, autocorrect can come to the rescue of quick typists who frequently misspell common words while Grammarly catches the sentence fragments and incongruous tenses, but neither of these can take the place of a trained editor. Yes, you need the services of an editor. And while you may know this already, it is safe to question whether or not you know what type of editing service you need. Thankfully, writing editors can offer up to 4 levels of editing service, each of which cater to a very specific type of writing level, or stage of the draft. It is important to know that while most writers of books may require all 4 levels of service, smaller-scale writing may not necessarily require more than 2 or 3 of these services....

Can I Publish The Traditional Way?

Before I answer this question I’ll present a few statistics for your consideration. Currently in the US, there are approx. 50,000 published authors working full-time, with only 20% of these earning enough from their books to pay their bills. In Canada, the percentage is much more frightening with published authors, on average, making less than $10,000 per year - and this is down from $17,000 just two decades ago. I have no data for Canadian writers sustaining themselves with their writing income exclusively, but I have to believe the number is extremely low. Assuming you’re okay with this, I’ll move on. Traditional publishing is, arguably, the preferred route. After all, you get paid for your work and your company takes care of all the marketing. But if you are a new writer you will have to put in extra work because you don’t know the world of publishing and you’ve yet to establish a reputation for yourself in it. Some of this work includes choosing a marketable genre, having...

Initialisms? IMHO, Don't Use Them

What is the difference between an acronym and an initialism? An acronym is an abbreviation of a word where the initial letters of each word used in the abbreviation are pronounced as a word. Examples of this include AIDS and AWOL. An initialism is exactly the same, except the letters are pronounced separately. Examples of this include HIV and NCIS. If we want to get detailed we can also add mnemonic to this list, but for the sake of brevity I leave that to you to read about in your own time. If you're in business, I recommend that you do. I'll level with you and admit freely that I enjoy the occasional initialism. In both text and Facebook messages I am much more inclined to type TTYL, LMAO, and IMHO than I am to write their meanings out in full. As an editor I know better, but it’s very hard to ignore the delicious autocorrect invitation to skip the typing, and even harder to argue against the fact that almost everyone knows what these letters stand for. The truth is, these...

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