Today saw a kerfluffle unfold on Twitter wherein one young bestselling debut YA author accused Nora Roberts, a grande dame of book publishing and author of countless bestsellers over four decades, of "shamelessly profiting" off her book by using a very similar title for her next book

This brings up a great point. Isn't it plagiarizing to steal another author's title, especially if the first book was a success?

Well...no. And that brings us to today's #pubtip: You can't copyright a book title. And once you spend some time thinking about it, you'll know that's obvious, because lots of books share the same titles! Sometimes it's titles that don't seem particularly original, e.g., the many romance novels called something like Forbidden Love." But sometimes this happens even with titles that feel as though they ought to be unique. I can only imagine how it felt to the authors (and their agents and editors) to discover that Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS and Callanan's THE CLOUD ATLAS were both being published in 2004.

That's a weird coincidence, right? Imagine harboring a phrase like "Cloud Atlas" in your heart for years and then...someone else has it too?! It's like planning to name your baby something unique and then seeing it on your sister-in-law's birth announcement.

(For the record, I feel compelled to say I have neither reserved nor infringed on any baby names, but there's a lot of crossover between the protectiveness people feel about their intellectual babies and their actual children. Just know that for book babies and human babies, "dibs" is not enforceable through copyright law.)

Now, does this mean you can run out right now and write a book called "Harry Potter and the Chicken Casserole"? Again: well...no. Titles are not copyrightable, but distinct words or symbols of a brand are trademarkable, and J.K. Rowling did indeed trademark Harry Potter and some associated intellectual property. (Fuzzy on the distinction? Many are, so here's a good explainer from GalleyCat (RIP) on the difference between copyright and trademarks and how they each work with book titles.)

Coincidences like the two "Cloud Atlas" books happen, and title trends come and go. The book title that started this whole conversation, Tomi Adeyemi's, is part of a trend in book titles that is going strong and has been for a while. In fact, I included her book in a roundup of similar titles from last year in this Tweet about upcoming SFF titles. Here are some examples of the type:

I've been thinking more lately about what kinds of edits I find myself advising clients to frequently. What are the most common sticking points?  What are the types of mistakes I see pop up across books of different topics and writers of different skill levels?

Earlier today I posted some advice on Twitter about writing and revising nonfiction book proposals, inspired by realizing I was giving overlapping advice to clients in the last couple of weeks who were tackling a certain kind of proposal. In the unrolled thread below, I've called this proposal structure Examples Of A Phenomenon.

I hope it's helpful to writers who aren't getting the feedback they seek from agents or editors, or who are looking for ways to strengthen a draft before submitting to agents.

Even if I weren't a former copy editor, I'd be horrified by the announcement that the New York Times is cutting back on editorial staff just when we need them most. The copy desk responded this week in a powerful, heartfelt letter.

But copy editors shouldn't have to justify their jobs.

Copy editors are who save your article from being in the anals of history.

We're the ones who advise against doing great pubic services, getting caught in a vice grip, or seaming week.

We also check your math (does that new treatment increase survival rates by 16% or 16 percentage points?); review sources to confirm that hot tip wasn't a from Russian bot; check whether Colin Farrell's iconic scene in 'Pride and Prejudice' was in fact Colin Firth's; remind you Ivana was the wife and Ivanka's the daughter and that Charles Lindbergh was the antisemite superstar pilot while Howard Hughes was the jar-peeing superstar pilot; and fix wacky spelling and punctuation errors--which reminds me, do the semiautomatics used by "eighteen year-old Marines" have a specialized grip for toddler-sized hands?

In short, it's a terrible idea to fire your copy editors. When the Post tried it, errors exploded. Trust in the paper dropped. (See, e.g., here.)

So be nice to your copy editors. There they're to save your assess.

Well, folks, it's time for another edition of #TIHLU-Things I Had to Look Up while copyediting.

This month covers all manner of projects, from freelance work on novels to editing book proposals. 
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The first one, "pailettes," I looked up for a book proposal project at my day job. It's part of a great chapter in a memoir that touches on visiting the glamorous shop where the author's mother worked. (I'm definitely still fuzzy on how they're different from sequins, though I found one site that advised they're a slightly different, shape!)

"Sheetrock" is a new one for me--I hadn't realized it was still a trademarked term. I was checking a different term against a list of genericized trademarks, and "Sheetrock" was on the list. I checked trusty Merriam-Webster online and discovered that it's still considered to be a specific, trademarked term for dry wall. This is important for a copyeditor to note, because trademarked terms, such as Kleenex and Dumpster, must be capitalized, while their generic counterparts are lowercased, such as tissue and...what the heck is the generic Dumpster? "Big-ass trash bin"?

So onto my sacred master copyediting checklist Sheetrock went, under the section marked "Capitalized Trademarked Terms." I run a global search for every word on that list before submitting a final cleaned-up project to ensure they're all properly capitalized.

Here's what I had to look up this month:

Back with a new edition of #TIHLU! As a quick refresher, I've been using that hashtag to lift up the copyediting curtain and show what goes on behind the scenes ever since a student asked me, quite earnestly, if I ever had to look up a rule or a spelling when editing. (Short version: yes, I do, all the time, and so do all other editors.)

A quick note--if you've read this blog before, you know that most of the editing I do is in Chicago style. In other words, it follows the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (That's what most major US publishers use as the basis of their house style guides.) Chicago style prefers Merriam-Webster when checking for preferred spellings and definitions, so that's the dictionary I turn to most frequently.

Of course, not everything is in that dictionary or that style manual. For example, I recently edited a legal thriller that borrowed certain conventions from legal writing. Those were nowhere in CMoS. And I routinely look up words that, it turns out, are nowhere to be found in Merriam-Webster. If what you're looking for can't be found, what do you do?

In those cases, I turned to special extra resources. I looked up a term in a legal dictionary to confirm that, as the author suggested, it should not be hyphenated. (He was right: "black letter law" would be hyphenated by CMoS rules, but we chose to leave it off thanks to the legal dictionary.) Other times, I'll look at regional dictionaries or the official website of a company, organization, or person, as was the case with Weezy down at #10 below. And yes, I've even checked spellings and definitions on UrbanDictionary--most recently for a book project with a teenage narrator.

Here's a roundup of what I've had to check on lately:
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When one of my colleagues asked me to guest teach a class on editing in his course on narrative nonfiction writing at Georgetown University, I was flattered. And when he told me this "class" would be held at a bar, and I'd get one-on-one time with each student to go over their essays (which I'd marked up and returned ahead of time), I thought all classes should be taught this way.

I'm only sort of kidding. I spent two years teaching English, but in a much, much different setting--at a boarding high school for gifted math and science students in Gongju, South Korea. In the casual setting of the bar, I encouraged these (adult) students to ask questions, to press me on the reasons for any changes they didn't intuitively understand, and to talk about their writing choices.

One student, after hearing me cite the rule behind a particular common error, asked tentatively, "Is there anything you still have to look up when you're editing?"

I almost snorfed my lovely-yet-affordable Shiraz. "I look stuff up all the time!" I told her. "I have the Chicago Manual of Style Online and Merriam Webster set to open tabs when I start my browser."

The truth is that even the most experienced editors have to double-check stuff. Every writer and editor I know has at least a few bugaboos, rules or distinctions that somehow just seem less intuitive than the rest.

So in November, I started keeping track of what I had to look up--and publicly owning up to each one. Being a good proofreader or copyeditor isn't about knowing all of the rules cold; it's about figuring out where your blind spots are and filling in the gaps with expertise, either by consulting the right resources or training yourself to understand and remember something you've struggled with.

On Twitter, you can find the things I've had to look up recently under the hashtag #TIHLU, for Things I Had to Look Up. The first five are below--and you're welcome to Tweet your own!
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Can you see me blushing from way over there?  

It's because my client Marian Schembari just published an article, "Why I Hired an Editor to Help Me Polish My Personal Essay," that cuts to the heart of why I love my job.

In it, she talks about the process of writing, editing, and pitching a personal essay (hers was ultimately snapped up by xoJane) over six months. While all writing is personal in some sense, this piece--an essay about grappling with and recovering from an emotionally abusive relationship--was exceptionally so.  She wrestled with getting it just right. How could she share unflattering details without coming across as unsympathetic? How could she tell her story, which involves abuse, without it turning into a hit piece about her abuser? How could she show how far her thinking has come without throwing her teenage self under the bus? She knew she needed a fresh, objective set of eyes, but finding an editor who could streamline and strengthen her work without undermining her voice was a challenge. 

As she put it, 

Working with Marian was an absolute pleasure, and I happen to like her personally. But that description, "my story, but better," is what I work toward on every project. 

The rest of her essay interviews other editors, talks about editorial communication styles, and lays out what you should look for in an editor. You can read it here.

I see this error all the time, and no wonder--it's not something your eye would naturally catch.
Unless, of course, you have doomed yourself to a lifetime of noticing punctuation faults, because you are an editor. (In which case, 화이팅!)

Here's the thing: sometimes we write out a span or range with words, like this:
"She was president of Punctuationland from 1987 to 1989."
But sometimes we write it out with just the numbers, like this: 
"She was president of Punctuationland 1987–89."  
or
"See the detailed topographical maps of Punctuationland, pp. 193–205."

The punctuation between those numbers looks a bit like a hyphen, but it's something else. Hyphens work to connect ideas that are very close together into one idea. But connecting and indicating a whole range of things? For that, we need to call in the big guns: the en dash.  

An en dash is just a bit bigger than a hyphen. In fact, depending on the font you use, it's usually about the width of the letter n. 

(An em dash is a bit bigger than that—here's one of them. In many fonts, an em dash is about the width of the letter m.)

You can find an en dash in MS Word under "symbols", but it's easy to assign it a shortcut. On my computer, I hold down Cntrl + hyphen to make an en dash, and Cntrl + Shft + hyphen to make an em dash.  Once you get used to it, you can let that poor beleaguered little hyphen off the hook.

Editing a proposal today, I spotted two instances of this one. 

When you write out a full date, you separate the elements with a comma like so:
On June 26, 2015, I wrote this blog post.
or
Tomorrow is Saturday, 27 June, 2015. 
(US style is usually written in month-day-year format; UK style is often day-month-year, but the comma rules are the same.)

When you cite just the month and year, you don't need a comma.

President Obama was born in August 1961.
In January 2009, he took the presidential oath of office.

People get this wrong all the time. I see a lot of errors like this:
*I visited her in September, 2012. 

This piece from the Chicago Manual of Style on finding solutions to grammar and style issues is a great article--or at least, it's an article that asks an important question.

When I started teaching English as a foreign language to gifted Korean high school students, I sometimes struggled to explain the why behind a correction. It was easy enough to explain some rules, even ones that challenged native speakers, such as using "less" with mass nouns and "fewer" with count nouns. 
But why were verb forms like "going to" and "will" (as in "he's going to call them" and "he will call them") often interchangeable, but sometimes not?  And why did it sound so wrong to say "the yellow big bus" instead of "the big yellow bus"?

My students were curious, and I wanted to give them concrete explanations.  The problem was, not only did I not know the rules, I often didn't even know what to look up.  What do you call words like "thankfully" and "hopefully" when they apply to the whole sentence instead of just the grammatical subject? If you don't know the term "disjunct adverb," it's tough to look up the rules governing their use.

Every day, I learned more. And after two years of teaching, I could explain a whole lot without looking it up. Even better, I'd found the resources to check anything I hadn't yet learned.

Now, when I need to check on a particular rule, I almost always know what I'm looking for. I can google "exceptions to rules on hyphenating phrasal adjectives" or look up "disjunct adverbs" in the Chicago Manual of Style's index. 

It's a lot easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet.