Just about every time I open my email of late, there is another ‘publicist’ raving about one of my books. They tell me my books are getting the short shrift and deserve a wider audience.
I couldn’t agree more.
These emails were flooding in at such a rate that clearly my TikTok has made me a star, Bradley Cooper has finally outed me as his secret crush, or something is afoot at the Circle K.
Continue reading “If It Seems to Good to Be True… (Navigating the New World of Author Marketing Emails)”I love new years—the fresh starts, new habits, and the grand opportunity to leave a few things behind.
Every year I create challenges for myself. No one tells me to do it and there’s no great reward at the end. The stakes are basically nothing. Sometimes, I invite others to join me, which, at least on the surface, creates a little accountability.
Last year, I created the Lighten Your Load, Lighten Your Life challenge. I planned to let go of five ‘things’ every day, all year.
Continue reading “What Are YOU Doing with Your New Year?”Finally! After a three year drought, I have a new book coming out in 2025! And this one was sure worth waiting for.
Note: Maybe this is old news because you follow me on Facebook or subscribe to Another Good Dog. So if that’s the case, you have my permission to skip this blog post. Or you can read it again because, hey, this is good stuff and there’s dog pictures!
My newest book is a little different. It’s a passion project, for sure, and it’s been five years in the making. It’s also a nonprofit venture.
Continue reading “New Book Coming in 2025!”My most recent novel, Blind Turn, has had the longest and most winding road to publication of all my books. I looked back through my files to try to figure out when I started writing it – as best as I can tell, I began writing it in 2010.
I was inspired to think about this because it was chosen to be the Ereader News Book of the Day for this Friday, August 30. For one day it will be just 99 cents!
So, if your reason for not buying a copy has been that you don’t want to spend the money, here’s your chance to get an e-copy for less than a dollar. There’s not much you can buy for less than a buck these days, so I hope you’ll take a chance on me..]
Back to my long and winding story, which I’ll try to keep brief by sharing it in a timeline:
Continue reading “The Long and Winding Road to Publication”I listen to podcasts or audiobooks pretty much every day – while walking, doing puzzles, or driving (three activities I seem to spend a lot of time doing).
I’ve gotten addicted to a podcast called Primal Potential. I found it because I was trying to figure out how to lose the menopause/COVID/drinking-too-much-wine-weight that is not going away even though two out of those three causes have.
Continue reading “Impact Hour”
And I’m off!
Where to, you ask?
Why, success and fame, of course.
(success and fame are relative terms.)
Continue reading “Can You Handle the S#*t Sandwich?”Let’s be honest—the publishing world is rigged.
After twenty years wrestling with words, agents, editors, publishers, and social media, I’m not saying this in a bitter way. Just as a matter of fact.
Continue reading “#Truth: The Publishing World is Rigged”Okay, okay, so I kind of fell off the SHOW YOUR WORK daily bandwagon, but I have great excuses.
Excuse #1: I was getting tired of me, me, me.
When you have a new book coming out, you have to promote yourself. I always struggle with this, and that probably Continue reading “SHOW YOUR WORK A Week Later”
So much can change in a week, right? Our world turns upside down. Everything is different.
And yet it is still the same.
For me, there are still dogs to rescue, family to feed, books and blogs to write, and with spring, a garden to tend.
I am so hyper-aware (and incredibly grateful—to what? God? Fate? Timing?) that we are lucky. Continue reading “HELP WANTED: From a Distance”
Grammar has never been my thing.
I loved diagramming sentences in middle school, but the finer details have always escaped me.
I suppose that’s par for the course as I also have a tendency to skip directions, skim long descriptions in novels, and not put the last book/cup/stray sock in its place. When I weed a garden, a bucketful of weeds usually linger beside the garden long enough to kill the grass beneath it.
I’m an idea person.
So, the bigger grammatical elements I can handle; it’s the nitpicky stuff that trips me up.
Which is why my favorite person in the publishing process is the copy editor. The copy editor keeps me from sounding like I barely passed sixth grade English.
I recently received the proof for my book that’s coming out in August and there were over 400 marks on it. (YES, that’s a lot, even for me.)
And yes, the book had already been copyedited. The proofreader, though, seems to be a zealous person. A nit-picker of nit-pickers, which, I suppose you want in a proofreader.
Many of the nits she was picking pertained to my voice, so my editor and I decided we’d stet most of her marks, which is a fancy way of saying we’d ignore them. (stet= Latin for ‘let it stand’)
Many more of the marks were additional commas she’d added to make my overly long sentences clearer. Okay, maybe.
I’ve spent the better part of my week considering those commas. I’m only more confused, but at least Frankie has finally realized I’m not talking to him as I read sentence after sentence out loud with and without a comma. He no longer jumps off the futon in hopes of a treat each time he hears my voice.
The marks that pushed me over the edge, though, are the commas placed before the word ‘too.’
Everywhere the word appeared, the proofreader had inserted a comma preceding it.
For example-
I spent the entire day learning about commas, too.
Until a month ago, I had always put a comma before the word too, too.
But during the copy editing process, the copy editor had removed all my commas proceeding the word too at the end of a sentence. When I saw that, I thought—wait, wait, I don’t know much about grammar, but I KNOW there should be a comma before the word too!
A little research turned up the cold, hard, truth – my middle school English teacher was wrong.
That. Rocked. My. World.
Do you know how many times I’ve written a comma before the word too incorrectly? Do you know how many times that incorrect comma has been published?
Now, here was this proofreader reinserting every comma the copy editor had removed.
AGH! Who to trust? I posed the question to my editor and she said, The copy editor.
To prevent you from ever losing sleep over the use of a comma before the word too, let me set the record straight:
From no less than Grammarly, my go-to and permanently installed editor (which is a FREE Chrome extension- YOU should download it now!):
When using the word too, you only need to use a comma before it for emphasis. According to The Chicago Manual of Style, a comma before too should be used only to note an abrupt shift in thought. When too comes in the middle of a sentence, emphasis is almost always intended since it interrupts the natural flow of the sentence.
I, too, like bananas.
When a too comes at the end of a sentence, however, a comma is almost never needed.
I like bananas too.
So, now you know.
Always trust the copyeditor.
Hey, thanks for reading. I know you’ve got lots of options, so thanks for sharing a few of your minutes with me.
Honored,
Cara
If you’d like to know more about me, my books, and where you might run into me, check out my website, CaraWrites.com.
If you’d like to subscribe to my (sometimes) monthly e-newsletter, click here.
If you’re a dog lover, check out my other blog, Another Good Dog.
I’d love to connect with you on Facebook, twitter, or Instagram, and I’m thrilled to get email from readers (and writers), you can reach me at carasueachterberg@gmail.com.
COMING AUGUST 2018 FROM Pegasus Books (available for preorder now):
My Life in Paragraphs 