Imajin Books

Choose Your Spelling: American? British? Canadian?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 4 Comments

Anyone remember Steve Martin’s joke about language? “The French, they have a different word for everything.”

Let’s apply this to English. American, British and Canadian spelling. Why do we spell the same word with different letters?

If you’re writing a book, you have a decision to make. What version of spelling will you use? The important thing is to be consistent. Pick one and stay with it.

I originally wrote everything in Canadian spelling. After a discussion with Imajin Books, we decided to use American spelling. Why? Because of the broader audience appeal. This is subjective decisions, so you might have other reasons for picking a language base, and that’s okay.

Proofreading for this is difficult. Most of us read books from various countries and are used to seeing the words spelled differently, How do you know if you’re consistent if the words look correct?

The answer: Run the manuscript though more than one spell checker.

Here is my experience with spell checkers.

Scrivener picked up some of the words, but when I ran the Word spell checker it picked up others. If you don’t have more than on spellchecker on your computer, borrow someone else’s.I used three spell checkers. I use a Mac and my husband uses a PC. I sent my manuscript to his computer. Even the Mac versus PC Word versions pick up different words.

I’ve written three novels in the Stone Mountain Mystery series, so my homework… I’ve finished updating DESCENT to American spelling. Now I have to go and update BLAZE and AVALANCHE too.

If you haven’t read my blog before, I’ve signed on with Imajin Books and intend to blog about my publishing adventure. I’ll share what I learn and hope it helps someone out there get their novel published.

Thanks for reading…

How to Write a Description For the Back Cover of Your Novel

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 5 Comments

Writing a Book Description?

Here are some ideas that might help. I’ve shared my book description (blurb) for DESCENT, the first novel in The Stone Mountain Mystery series, below and outlined how we arrived at the final description.

Step One: Decide what you want to tell the reader. You want to give away enough to intrigue the reader but not so much that you take away from the suspense. I was tempted to put too much information in the description and pulled back a bit.

The goal of DESCENT’s description is to give the potential reader the idea that:

  • Kalin Thompson is the protagonist
  • The story takes place in a remote mountain resort
  • The crime is a murder
  • The victim is a talented ski racer
  • Ongoing conflict between Kalin’s boyfriend and her boss will be a struggle for Kalin

Once you know what you want to say,  write, rewrite and rewrite again.

Step Two: Decide who your audience is. For me, I want an international audience. How does that affect the description? I’d used RCMP in the description? You’ll see below that RCMP is now cops. RCMP is a very Canadian acronym. My bad for assuming it was a world-wide term 🙂

Step Three: Get feedback from anyone you trust. Then write, rewrite and rewrite again.

Final Product: The idea behind the two paragraph description below is if we need a short version, we can use the first paragraph only. The first paragraph is designed to end with a hook just in case that’s all we use. I hadn’t thought of that in my first try at a description.

The back of the book description for DESCENT is:

When Kalin Thompson is promoted to Director of Security at Stone Mountain Resort, she soon becomes entangled in the high-profile murder investigation of an up-and-coming Olympic skier. There are more suspects with motives than there are gates on a super-G course, and danger mounts with every turn.

Kalin’s boss orders her to investigate the murder. Her boyfriend wants her to stay safe and let the cops do their job. Torn between loyalty to friends and professional duty, Kalin must look within her isolated community to unearth the killer’s identity.

Now as with other changes, I have to wade across the internet and change everywhere I’ve put a blurb out for DESCENT.

If you haven’t read my blog before, I’ve signed on with Imajin Books and intend to blog about my publishing adventure. I’ll share what I learn and hope it helps someone out there get their novel published.

Thanks for reading…