It’s launch day for The Well-Presented Manuscript: Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional, my new non-fiction book for my fellow writers. Currently, it’s exclusive to Amazon, but if you use other outlets, I’ll soon have it available in the B&N, Kobo and Apple stores and via Oyster and Scribd.

I’ve just finished reading Damon Knight’s excellent book Creating Short Fiction. I was pleased to note that his section on “How to Be Publishable” included the point that you need a command of language, including some knowledge of how to assemble words into phrases and sentences, and a good active vocabulary. That’s exactly what The Well-Presented Manuscript is about: developing the basic competence with the tools and materials of language that will get your fiction read by editors, reviewers and the general public.

Nowhere is this more important than in your blurb or pitch, which is one of the first things your prospective reader will see. Just this morning, I read a blurb in which “Scottish” was spelled with three consecutive Ts. As it happens, I’ve read part of the book concerned, and the editing is terrible (which is why I stopped reading). The blurb does tip you off to what the book is going to be like.

So here’s the blurb for The Well-Presented Manuscript:

Do you want to be taken seriously by editors, readers or reviewers?
Do you make errors in your fiction writing?
This book is for you.

Mike Reeves-McMillan is a fiction author, reviewer, and former copy editor and technical writer. He’s analysed the errors he’s found in almost 250 books, both indie and traditionally published, and written a simple, clear guide to avoiding the most common issues.

Learn:
– Why editors reject 90% of what’s submitted to them—and how to increase your chances.
– How to get punctuation right every time.
– The special conventions of dialog.
– The most common word confusions, typos, and research errors—and how to check for and eliminate them.

If that interests you, please go to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Well-Presented Manuscript. (That’s an affiliate link–it costs you the same, but pays me more.) I promise you’ll learn at least two useful things you didn’t know before.

More News

I recently reviewed my short story submission stats for the first half of this year, and compared them with the full-year stats for last year.

I’m submitting at about the same rate (23 for the half-year, versus 44 for the full year last year). My proportion of personal rejections to form rejections has improved slightly (8:9 instead of 14:20). But the big jump is in acceptances: four so far this year, versus one for the whole of last year.

I’ll announce the publications as they come out, but I’ve made two sales to online magazine The Sockdolager (one of them already published); placed a story with In Memory, a charity anthology honouring Terry Pratchett and benefiting Alzheimer’s research; and sold another story to The Overcast, a fiction podcast.

I’m continuing to write new stories, and keeping them in circulation. There are over 100 professional and semi-professional science fiction and fantasy publications soliciting stories at the moment, so it’s a wonderful time to be writing short fiction.

On the novel side, I have three or four more edit passes to go on Auckland Allies, the first in a new urban fantasy series. It’s set in Auckland, New Zealand, where I live. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope to bring it out in the next few months.

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.