The technical side of getting your book ready to upload — without losing your mind Formatting is the part of self-publishing that nobody warns you about until you’re already deep in it. You’ve written the book. You’ve edited it. You feel done. And then you discover that uploading a Word document to a print-on-demand platform …
On a collapsed $2 million book deal A debut crime novel lost its publisher this summer. The reported advance was around $2 million. The stated reason was not that the book was bad — nobody has said the book was bad. The reason was that the author’s agents said they could no longer authenticate how …
By S. Durrant Comparing the best novel to screenplay converter tools in 2026 — FluidScriptr, LivingWriter, AI chatbots, and traditional screenwriting software. Which fits your manuscript and budget? If you’ve finished a novel and want to see it as a screenplay, you have more options in 2026 than ever before — and they range from …
Learn how to adapt a novel into a screenplay step by step — structure, format, what to cut, and the tools that make adaptation faster. A practical guide for authors. DW Brown You’ve written a novel. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you’ve pictured it on screen — the opening shot, the casting, the …
Some grammar errors are about sentence structure. These aren’t — they’re about word choice, and they’re some of the most frequent corrections in any copy edit, showing up even in manuscripts that are otherwise clean and polished. Here’s the list worth knowing cold. Lay vs. Lie This is the single most commonly confused pair in …
Tense inconsistency is one of the hardest errors for authors to catch in their own work, because it usually happens in small, localized slips rather than as a wholesale confusion about past versus present tense. A writer who chose past tense on page one and knows the whole book is in past tense can still …
“Avoid passive voice” is some of the most repeated writing advice in existence, and also some of the most frequently misunderstood — because most writers who’ve heard the rule can’t reliably identify passive voice when they see it, let alone judge when it’s actually the better choice. What Passive Voice Actually Is Passive voice happens …
These are two of the most common sentence-level errors we flag in a line edit, and they’re worth understanding properly rather than just patching one instance at a time — because once you see the underlying pattern, you start catching them yourself before a manuscript ever reaches an editor. What a Comma Splice Actually Is …
Of everything we correct in a line edit, dialogue punctuation is the most common — and the most fixable. These are mechanical rules, not style choices, which means there’s no “voice” defense for getting them wrong. Here’s what to know. Commas, Not Periods, Before Dialogue Tags If dialogue is followed by a tag like she …
Introducing FluidScriptr — a new tool from Tin House Press for writers ready to take their stories further. You wrote the book. Now someone asks: is there a screenplay? It’s a question more writers are hearing. The lines between publishing formats have blurred — novels become series, memoirs become documentaries, short stories become short films. …
