The acceptability clause allows publishers to determine whether a submitted manuscript is acceptable. For authors who don’t have any legal knowledge or literary agent to help them negotiate the contract, they are often left to do their own research or accept what’s offered to them. This leaves the author with very little power over the development of their work, resulting in a generally unfavorable opinion of the clause.
When I started managing the rights department at Ooligan Press about a year ago, I took on one of our first major projects: acquiring the rights to nine different French science fiction short stories for an anthology. It was an ambitious enterprise, but the previous managers did all of the legwork for setting it up. They found a French professor at our university who already had the idea for the anthology and agreed to translate (with the help of a few others); all that was left to do was find the owners of the rights to each story and acquire them for the anthology.
Over the past several years, manga has been experiencing huge growth. One of the many reasons for its appeal is likely due to anime. While book to screen adaptations or screen to book projects aren’t uncommon in other genres, it’s far more common with manga and anime.
Luckily for freelance editors, there are a handful of editorial societies that are available to join to build a sense of community even when working remotely. Providing encouragement and learning resources, each of the organizations listed below are sure to provide some benefit to your range of skills whether you prefer something free to low cost or have the funds to invest in a high-end membership.
Assessing the structural integrity of a house is what developmental editing is to a manuscript. When doing a developmental edit, an editor will organize their thoughts and notes into a cohesive document called the developmental editing letter, or sometimes just the editorial letter, which will then be sent to you. What can you expect from the editorial letter?
Everyone has a favorite genre or story, but comfort isn’t always the key to selecting a desirable manuscript. A publisher should be aware of systemic issues and internal bias. There are fine lines between genre expectations, tropes, and stereotypes. A publisher should consider how these expectations function in the manuscript before rejecting a piece or prescribing edits.
Artificial spell-checking and editing software like Grammarly has been around for several years, but in recent years, more robust artificial intelligence programs have been developed to write documents and fully edit them with little to no human interference. This flux in AI programs for writing and editing has certain implications for the future of copyediting, but can AI really become proficient enough to fully replace human editors? We’ll explore this question in this blog post.
It’s not a bad cover by any means, but in a world where the books we read often perform as style accessories on top of mere storytelling vessels, I knew there was an opportunity to give her something more unique—something she’d love to pick up based on the cover alone. Not to mention that personalized gifts are always the best anyway!
The award-winning Ooligan book Extreme Vetting: a Thriller by Roxana Arama has been out for over a year. Did you know that two Ooligan students narrated the audiobook version—and it’s awesome? Haley Young, one of the narrators, recounts her experience.
HTML is the original language of computers and it is the main tool that helps us correctly translate how we want content to show on the browser. But why would that be important to a publishing house?