Remember the time when it was difficult to become a published author? Back in the day there were only two routes available – either you were lucky enough to be picked up by a publisher, or you paid a small fortune to a dodgy company to ‘vanity publish’ your book. Now, of course, it’s different. …
As The Proof Fairy, I am best known for working with self-publishing authors, ensuring their manuscripts are word-perfect before publication. However, I actually offer a much wider range of services revolving around WORDS – including copywriting, proofreading, newsletter design and WordPress website build and maintenance (see what I did there?!). To give you an idea of …
Finished writing your book? Ready to get on with the tricky job of proofreading it? Great! But let me cut to the chase straight away. I would not recommend that you proofread your manuscript yourself. You see, you’re just too close to the content. You know what you wrote (or at least, what you think you …
After taking a break from self-employment for a couple of years, I threw myself back into business with much enthusiasm and found myself out networking and meeting new and interesting people. I always go away and have a look at the websites of people I meet … and I have spotted an issue that could …
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have various Google Alerts set up to let you know if someone on the internet mentions your business name or topics of interest. I have several of these and while they’re not always relevant, they do give me food for thought sometimes. One of the alerts is for the …
Over the weekend a strange thing happened. I received an anonymous banker’s draft for quite a large sum of money. No identifying information, no name, no compliments slip – no way of identifying who it was from. At first I decided I must have a mysterious benefactor who wanted to give me a bit of …
I recently finished writing my first book (The Boy from Hell: Life with an ADHD Child, if you’re interested!) and though I am paying another proofreader to check it over for me, I went through various editing and proofing stages first. Perhaps the most interesting though has been proofreading on a Kindle. Once I had …
Here's an entertaining guest blog post from Ciaran Oliver that really demonstrates the importance of using a good proofreader! I personally find Microsoft Word spell checker very annoying but I have to admit it often saves me from making awkward mistakes. Unfortunately – or fortunately? – in the offline world we cannot count on a …
Do you ever find yourself typing something and discovering halfway through that you caught the cAPS LOCK KEY AND HALF WHAT YOU’VE WRITTEN IS IN capitals? I do it all the time – and it can be a right pain changing it all, especially if you’ve written quite a bit. The Convert Case website lets …
… or maybe this should actually be called “How to write a best seller without knowing the first thing about writing”! You can’t fail to have heard about the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon. You know, the pornographic erotic novels about Christian Grey, the man every woman I know seems to be swooning over even …
