Sunday, November 27, 2011

"The Writer's ABC Checklist"

Today's book is “The Writer's ABC Checklist” by Lorraine Mace and Maureen Vincent-Northam. While I had seen plenty of its subject matter, such as punctuation and tense, in other books I still learned something from it.

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One thing this book covered that none of the others did was e-books. I've learned from various websites that e-books can be a good way to keep visitors coming back to your website for excellent free material, or they could be another product for you. The format is quite different from a normal book. They're generally in .PDF format, and “generally read straight from a screen.” They also can't be copied or altered. Staring at the screen is hard on the eyes, so there needs to be a lot more white space than a normal book. Also, these books aren't long, “around 30 pages on average,” though the reason is still a mystery to me.

Almost all of the useful material in this book—like kill fees, websites and blogs, or grammar--has been covered in the other books I've reviewed. There are times when a book on writing for publication can still be useful to a copywriter like me, but this one isn't one of them. The main selling point seems to be the questions' “ABC” format, but a table of contents does the job just fine. I'll be sticking with my other books.

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