The Well-Presented Manuscript: Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional is available for preorder on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010RJOAYA. Launch day is 14 July (US Pacific time).

I set out to write a gentle, accessible guide to avoiding or correcting the most common errors that fiction writers make. How do I know which ones those are? I read nearly 250 books–indie and trad-pub–and marked the errors in my Kindle, then analysed them. And who am I, anyway? I’m a fiction author, a former professional editor and technical writer, and a book reviewer.

I cover punctuation (including breaking down sentence structure and parts of speech, so you understand where the commas should go); the special rules of punctuating dialog; commonly confused words; spotting and removing typos; and even a few research problems. I also talk about submitting to short-fiction and trad-pub editors, who reject 90% or more of what they receive, and how you can increase your chances with them.

Even good writers make many of the mistakes I cover, and I mark the commonest ones for special attention.

If you’d like to improve your fiction manuscript, but find other guides confusing or too technical, give this one a try. With hundreds of examples, many drawn from real books, it’s focused on practical use, not theory.

You can see an early draft in blog form here: http://csidemedia.com/wellpresentedms (but I’ve substantially revised and expanded it for the book, and added several new chapters).