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The concept is great. An author chooses five of their favorite books and discusses why you should read it. Shepherd then gives you other book recommendations. What a great way to grow your to-read list!

8,000+ authors have shared five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood on Shepherd. They make it easy to find the books they recommend through a book you already love, an author you adore, or a Wikipedia topic that interests you. 

Recently, an author selected Graham Earnshaw’s The Great Walk of China: Why read The Great Walk of China? (shepherd.com).

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…and how to get it done yourself.

A crucial stage in the production of the perfect book is proofing, that is, the review and correction of the first or earlier drafts of the manuscript. This is enormously important but should not begin, in my view, until after the first draft has been completed. Proofing as you go is just going to delay and delay the inevitable moment when you have to face the prospect of actually declaring the thing finished, and is often a crutch used to avoid that. But once you have finished the first draft, you then go back to the front and start looking at it all from various perspectives, both micro and macro.

The first and most important question is, is this the right title for the book? If the title is right, you’re 40% of the way there to getting everything right, and by all means come up with a list of potential titles and run them past friends and colleagues to get a sense of the reaction to different ideas. Then you take a look at the Table of Contents and reconsider the overall building-block structure, but don’t spend too long on it because it’s a thought that should rather be in the back of your mind as you do the proofing.

Then dive in to the first page, first line, first word. The core trick is to read it as if you have never seen the words before, to approach it as a stranger, as someone who knows nothing about the author or the background or the story, and try to be as separated as possible from yourself and from the motivations and process of creation. This is a very hard mindset to embrace, but if you can do it, it will make a huge difference to how you approach the manuscript. The big problem with reading words that you have read before is that the eyes and brain just start to skim over parts that they assume were the same as last time, so you miss stuff

To proof properly, you have to force yourself to read every single damn word and think of each one in the context of the words around it.

What are you looking for?

First of all, you’re looking for spelling errors and punctuation problems, and to some extent Microsoft Word and Google Docs are useful in pointing out problems by providing red underlines under letter combinations not in their dictionaries. Pay attention to them, but not slavishly because the spellcheck function is robotic. If you come to rely on it too much, you will start to miss un-underlined words that the function mistakenly decides are correct.

When you spot a problem in terms of either spelling or phraseology or punctuation, my advice would be to put in a marker (I always use XXXX to mark where I’m up to) and do a global search for all instances of that issue throughout the manuscript. Only proceed when you have dealt thoroughly with the problem. Perhaps it is taking “US” and adding in periods to make it “U.S.” or fixing up date configuration from June 5^th, 1999 to 5 June, 1999. Whatever it is, make all those changes, globally. I generally want to have less Arabic numerals 1-2-3 and more written-out numbers one-two-three, and globally search for each numeral in turn. Some people like two spaces after every period at the end of a sentence, our house style is only one and of course that is a very easy global change to make, you search for two spaces and replace with one.

Global search brings up another important point — do not, as many authors do, split up the book into one chapter per Word document. Always combine them into one document and then you can make global changes fast and efficiently.

In terms of spelling, the most important rule is that consistency is next to godliness. What set of rules you use is of secondary importance. In terms of style, the American standards are the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style. I grew up with the Leslie Sellers’ book Doing It In Style (Sellers was a friend and colleague of my father in the newspaper world of Manchester in the 1960s). , and his advice has stuck with me, most particularly the importance of style. For British English, there is Fowler and the Times style guide. I have constructed or assisted in the creation of three style guides over the years, one for Reuters, one for Xinhua Finance and one for SinoMedia. Earnshaw Books doesn’t have a rigorously enforced set of style rules, and the only rule really is that the style should be consistent within any one document. I personally don’t like Oxford commas, but if the author insists, then it’s Oxford commas throughout. Whatever style guide you choose, be pretty rigorous in surrendering to the rules that they set.

One thing to look for and change is long long paragraphs. Generally speaking, cut them up because shorter paragraphs are much easier for people to read.

As you proceed, you’ll be thinking about the phraseology of various sentences, and this is the time to make changes to the phrasing. In general, you’re looking for anything that makes you, I the mindset of the fresh stranger reader, feel uncomfortable. It’s actually as simple as that. One of the things that might make you feel uncomfortable is the close proximity of two instances of the same word, and this is a good time to change one of them to something else. The double-use of “phrase” in the first sentence of this paragraph should have made you uncomfortable, but I left it in as an example.

Proofing is best done with consistent font throughout the document, and I personally use Times New Roman 12pt. A serif font such as TNR is much better for proofing than a sans-serif font because then letters have legs and arms which makes it easier for the brain to link them up into words and makes the flow of reading large amounts of text much easier. Another useful psycho-trick is to make all the text left-justified, that is ragged-right, as opposed to left-right justified which introduces irregular spacing between words which can slightly interrupt the mental flow.

The traditional format for galleys, the printed documents used for processing manuscripts in pre-computer times, was that they were always printed with double spacing, that is an empty line between each line of text, so that editors could mark, with a pen, changes to the text in the empty lines between. Many of the manuscripts that we receive electronically are in double spacing, and the first thing that I do is change it to single spacing, because it helps the brain to be exposed to as many words as possible on the screen at the same time. This is because a lot of the process of reading is peripheral, with the brain unconsciously picking up information from the blurred territory around the word you’re focusing on. A trick for quickly coming to grips with a manuscript is to choose something that needs changing throughout and then mindlessly do it. For instance, removing empty lines between paragraphs. By doing that, you are not reading the book, but by the end of it, you already know the book because you’ve peripherally absorbed everything about it.

As you proceed with the proofing, this is the time to check spelling and references in Wikipedia or your Grandad’s encyclopedia. 

It is very important to always use track changes when you are proofing.

This is the single best function in Microsoft Word and it is superior to the equivalent function in Google Docs. But make sure that while Track Changes is on, you are viewing the document with changes not visible or simple markup. Some writers, and I’m looking at YOU Jonathan smiley smiley, insist on editing with full markup showing, which can result in a heavily edited page being full of coloured lines, different coloured text, everything underlined or struck-through. Editing in that way, there is an absolute certainty you will insert extra mistakes, an extra space, a missed comma, something.

So while you are going through the document in this detailed way, your brain should be passively thinking about the overall structure, about whether there are bigger changes that should be made, building blocks moved around, large sections which are now, from the perspective of the stranger, boring and should be cut. Or is there a big new section needed to explain what is going on? If it is fiction, this is also the time to think about the internal logic of the story. Does this new development make sense? And if you’re writing fiction, this is also the time to read the direct quotes from the perspective of them actually being spoken. Does it sound natural? Does it give the right feel? Jonathan, mentioned above, and the author of The Eunuch, is brilliant at dialogue because he is an actor and has dealt with any number of movie scripts.  

Some other thoughts. During the process you might want to write notes to yourself, or the next person who will view the document. The Note function in Microsoft Word is okay, pretty clunky, but still effective, and it’s much better, I have finally decided, than leaving notes in the text. Don’t proofread for too long without a break. The brain starts to protest and shift down as a result. So once every hour or so, stand up and walk around. Do something else for a moment. Then you will return fresh to the words. Save the file you are working on reasonably regularly with a new filename — I use “book name v02.docx”, then v03 v04 etc.. This is a great way to back up a document, and Word (particularly in its iPad incarnation where I am usually to be found) can sometimes be unstable and lose changes. If proofing is being done in confiscation with someone else, for instance myself and an author, it is crucially important that it be done on strict pingpong rules. If I am editing it, you don’t touch it and vice-versa.

I should say here that I am not myself the best proofreader in the world. I am pretty good, but I miss more than I should. My two heroes are John Ross, the co-publisher of Camphor Press, who has found an embarrassing number of errors in books we have published, and Mark Woodworth who edited the superb memoir by Jean Perkins, Spring Flower.

One other small tip to end with, and that is to practice writing a summary of your book. There are several useful lengths to try.

One is to confine it to a single printed page which, depending on the font, is about 500 words. Then try summarizing it in 100 words, and after that, a single sentence. Sometimes I ask authors to write a summary of the story and they don’t include the ending … because that’s a secret for the reader to discover! That isn’t useful from the publisher’s perspective. I asked the author of a fantasy novel received recently to give me a “skeletal” summary of the story and he responded with 3,000 words. As my father, who was born and raised in the north of England, once said to me, you can boil any story down to an absolute minimum of three words.

“Take the history of the human race,” he said. “Adam ‘ad ‘em.”

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…or just an excuse?

Writers, usually beginners, often refer to the muse, the participant in the writing process who is essential to get anything done. This is complete hogwash. The muse is simply an excuse not to do any writing and to go and do something else instead. It is a sign of a lack of confidence, it is a sign that the writer has not prepared sufficiently or thought through what it is they are planning to do, it is a crutch and an excuse. The right way to do writing is to treat it like a job and to do it regularly and persistently, because, as we know and as has been rightly said only recently, persistence is victory.

The creative process is mysterious, it is true, and it is different from doing many other kinds of work that are simply rote repetition of tasks that require no real thought. But all of those jobs are before too long going to be taken over by AI powered robots anyway, and what will be left will be occupations and activities where the alleged presence of the Muse or the absence thereof is a factor in efficiency. But while, there is no Muse, there is definitely a Zone, a mental state that you can discover or cultivate, where the creative process becomes smoother, more easy. This is really just another way of saying “focus” and forcing oneself not to be distracted.

When a writer looks back at words written, or when somebody else looks at your words, there will be phrases that spring out as being interesting or brilliant or amazing, and you wonder where did that come from? How did I think of that? There are examples and stories of people dreaming of words or phrases or plots, and then waking up and writing them down and using them. But most of the really great phrases and passages in writing come from the simple process of sitting down to work, and doing it and being in the zone, letting the words flow, and then the so-called brilliance appear in the midst of an ordinary writing experience. If you wait for the Muse, the Muse will not come. If you ignore the Muse and just start writing, you can, if you like, imagine the Muse standing just behind you.

There are times in the creative process of writing where you hit an obstacle, you can’t think of what to write next, you can’t think of a way to solve the plot problem, whatever it is. The losers way is to blame the Muse’s absence and stand up and walk away to do something else. The smart way may be also to stand up, but you go for a walk or go for a drive, you do something which allows your brain some space. You do NOT fill your brain with another activity that goes beyond something automatic. Don’t focus on something new, and in the process of walking, or driving or having a shower, the brain will still working, turning over the problem, and it is amazing how often a solution then presents itself, sneaking up from the side. You then return to the computer or your embossed notebook, and continue the word production.

One of the most prolific and professional writers that I have ever come across is the Taoist monk, Yun Rou, aka Arthur Rosenfeld, author of A Cure for Gravity, published in New York, and Mistress Miao published by Earnshaw Books. Authors can sometimes write a lot but their work requires a lot of editing afterwards, and that’s fine. The editing can be done by the author or by me or someone else, but the most thing important is always that first draft no matter how flawed it is. An example is Douglas Clark’s groundbreaking work Gunboat Justice, on the legal systems of China during the colonial era, the full story of extraterritoriality, where he bulldozed through the first draft and then went back and filled it with quotes, details and embellishments. The result is a history tour de force that I am very proud we published. Personal memoirs are often done by people who have never written a book before and their process is usually not important because this is going to be the only book they ever write. In most cases, they spent years and years creating that one document. A recent example is Paul Hoffman’s Witness to History.

But for committed writers, regularity of creation is very important. If it becomes a habit, something you do on a regular basis, almost always daily, over a very short time you can achieve an enormous amount. My advice to authors is to set a daily target number of usable words produced, say 1,500, but it could be 1,000 or 2,000. There are writers who can do many more than 2,000 a day, but they’re very rare. The number relates largely not to how much time you have but to how clear you are on what you’re writing, whether you’ve planned it out properly and how fixed you are in the Zone. For instance, if you know your storyline and your characters and what they will say in certain circumstances, then you can just write and write and write, and it just flows out. My view also is that during the Zonal stream of consciousness writing put anything that is going to stop the flow to one side. So if you are writing non-fiction, for instance, and you get to a place where a statistic is required or a piece of information from Wikipedia, just put in XXX and continue the word flow. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted.

That brings us to the environment in which you are being creative, and everyone is different. Some absolutely require being alone in a room, white walls, no distractions. For much of the past 20 years, I personally have liked noisy Japanese restaurants, sitting at the sushi bar with the energy of the surrounding scene to which I am not attached mentally, driving me on as I work on whatever it is that I am doing so intensely on the screen. I personally don’t write too many books, but I edit a lot of them, and when I am in the zone and it is the right time to do it, I tend to process six or seven books at the same time and do a fixed percentage of each manuscript per day. And I’m not allowed to not do finish that percentage of each book each day. I’m just now in the process of finishing off the editing of seven books, and with each of them, regardless of how long they are, I have required myself to do 2.5% of each manuscript per day. I work out the percentage on the basis of pages in the Word documents. And persistence being victory, it’s very effective. I churn through these things and by the end of the process, I have seven manuscripts done, and it has taken me only around an hour per day over a period of two months.

Of course, creative production is an extremely personal topic and there are no absolute rules and many exceptions. You may be able to write a book by starting at the first page without any idea at all of the story or the characters. James Clavell, author of such novels as Taipan and Shogun, claimed that that is how he wrote, and I guess it’s possibly maybe even a little bit true. But it’s unlikely. If you sit down at the computer with a blank mind and write the word “The” on the blank screen, you’ll probably stare at the word for a while, then add “hell with it” and walk away.

using photos in your book…

With many of the titles that Earnshaw Books does, there is great desire, even insistence, from many authors that multiple photographs should be included. I often resist valiantly because, in my view, the most important images are those created by the words in the mind of the reader, and if the writing is effective, then 1,000 words is much better than a picture. There are some good examples that can be drawn from books in the Earnshaw Books production process currently: one title is a memoir by a former U.S. marine during the Vietnam War, probably to be titled Trail of Redemption, about the capture of a Viet Cong woman fighter he helped to capture amongst the paddy fields of South Vietnam, and he is very eager to have as many photographs as possible included. But the problem with most photographs from the past, by which i mean prior to the iPhone era, is that the quality tends to be low, they are faded and low in contract and detail, and the angles are often inappropriate. Therefore ineffective in terms of conveying an accurate feel of whatever it is was like. The person taking them was not a professional photographer, and with only 36 exposures on a roll of film, every shot was an event, none of the snap-snap-snap of digital photography, allowing for the capture of a pretty good image the 17^th time round. Also the quality of cameras back then in the 1960s and 1970s, let alone in the 1920s, was far from ideal, nowhere near the quality that can be achieved with a smart phone today.

But my reluctance to use lots of pictures is also related to that widespread belief that movies almost always fail to meet the visual expectations created by a good novel. People who loved a book are usually disappointed by its representation on the screen (Lord of the Rings being for many people the exception that proves the rule), and that speaks to the power of words and the magical ability of the brain to create images and emotions from those words. Have you ever cried or laughed while reading a story? I have. It’s a much more visceral experience than laughing or crying with a movie. In summary, the impact that an image has on the brain is much less intense than that created by a series of well-chosen words describing a scene or a person or whatever.

Another book we’re currently working on is the memoir of a photographer, probably to be entitled Recycling Reality, and thankfully the author proposed himself that we use almost no images, which I thought that was very brave of him, using the words to speak for him rather than hiding behind images.

But we also have a memoir called Spring Flower covering the dramatic roller-coaster ride of 20^th Century China, involving a peasant girl in Hubei adopted by American missionary doctors in the 1930s… named Jean Perkins… the civil war… teens in Yonkers… the Great Leap Forward… the Cultural Revolution… it’s in many ways a familiar historical vista, but this one is very special. It ties together so many strands: China and America, the past and the present, the countryside and the cities, ignorance and wisdom. We have already published Book 1 of the two-book set, and Book 2, under production, picks up the story in 1950, and is truly heart-rending. Some images are in this case necessary.

It’s a hard call to make, because I understand how much the images mean to the authors, but my belief is that to include too many devalues the project and reduces the impact of the words. I am sometimes willing to compromise and use a photograph at the beginning of each chapter, and there have been cases when we have done far more photographs. But in terms of the value to readers, I don’t think that we’re doing them a service by placing an image on every other page.

In a recent title The Great Wall in 50 Objects we have of course a picture of every object and, as indicated above, they are found either at the start of every chapter or in a color photo edition in the middle. The Lettuce Diaries, a fantastic exposé of a foreign businessman’s efforts to found a business in China, has no images because the author basically didn’t take any. And with some titles, such as Hokkaido, A History of Japan’s Northern Isle and its People, there are lots of artifacts and things that could be illustrated, but my thought is that that is what the internet is for. It is possible to Google these things and have instant access to hundreds of images of these objects so why bother.

This fewer-to-no-pix approach also pushes the author to obviate the need for the images by writing more and better descriptions, which is a more responsible attitude from a publishing point of view, in my opinion at least. So if you submit a manuscript, make sure that the places and the people are memorably built out in words before you attach any JPEGs. Happy writing!

& how to deal with them?

We receive probably an average of two or three manuscripts or communications from authors per week at Earnshaw Books and the way in which authors handle the reach-out to a publisher, or indeed an agent, has a significant impact on the way in which their manuscript is viewed, or if it is even viewed at all. The most common error that authors make is to provide an excerpt of the manuscript rather than the whole thing. This has almost no value to me. I can’t speak to all publishers and agents, but I want the full manuscript, in either Word or PDF form. I then have a system for taking a view on the manuscript, which can be done within minutes for many, or at the most half an hour, and it involves reading every word of the first page and the last page and page 42.

Why 42?

I use that number because that is the page my late mentor and great charismatic human being, Gareth Powell, said he always used to read to reach a decision on a manuscript. The number 42 is also significant for those who have read and love the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams who gives 42 as the answer to the question of: What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? Regardless, there is a process of flipping back and forth, back and forth through a manuscript in order to gain an impression of what it is and how it’s structured and how it is written. And while this is completely unscientific and arguably very slipshod, certainly from the perspective of the author who wants every magic word to be read and pondered, it does provide a pretty accurate view on what the manuscript is, which then leads to a conclusion as to whether or not it is publishable, what its value is and what basic problems it has. This cannot be done with an excerpt, it can only be done with the full manuscript. I never read an entire manuscript until after the agreement is signed.

The typical psychology of an author is that “my work is unique and the manuscript has in and of itself enormous value and I must be careful where I send it and be sure that it is not misused, abused or pirated.” This is all-too-precious as an attitude. Just throw it out there, would be my advice. The accompanying note should be a short e-mail with a few words saying who you are and pitching the book in elevator form, and then best regards. That covers the second biggest error made by authors in the process of submission — e-mails that just go on and on and on. People will not read them.

In terms of file format, my preference is Word over PDF, because then I can change the font and other aspects of formatting to meet my personal review/scan approach. When I’m scanning, and also editing, I want to see as many words on the screen as I can and so single line spacing is essential, as is a serif font like Times New Roman. Double line spacing is the standard for manuscripts, I know, and it made sense in the days when people edited printed documents. Nobody surely does that anymore. Double spacing halves the number of words you can see on the screen at any one time.

Most publishers and agents will ignore you and not even reply, some will reply with a stock phrase such as “this does not fit our List” or some other expression of “we pass.” With me, I always try to include some kind of suggestion for every one that I reject, as to how to make it more publishable, and it’s amazing how often authors will come back and argue about it in some way. The right response for any criticism is to accept it and act on it. Almost any criticism, anyway. Especially from strangers who have some level of credibility for whatever reason — they have a huge advantage over the author, which is objectivity.

In terms of a follow-up, if a manuscript is accepted, how involved should an author be in following up and keeping in contact about the status of the manuscript? The answer is that regular short e-mails are the way to go. How’s it going? Can I help in any way?

The other common problems with author submissions is asking if there is an advance, which there isn’t, asking for some kind of assessment as to the sales prospects or trying to set some kind of limits with regard to the sales territories as a precondition for signing. This last is particularly unacceptable in a world of total digital instant communication and I believe almost all publishers today only do global rights in all formats.

If a publisher makes suggestions as to how to change a manuscript, the author then has two choices, to make those changes or to ignore them. If the decision is to make the changes, then do so as quickly as possible and resubmit the manuscript. If the decision is to ignore them, then don’t bother the publisher any more, just go somewhere else. An example from just this week was a novel about an English teacher in China who has a series of affairs across the country and obviously it was autobiographical and my suggestion was to make it a memoir rather than fiction. The manuscript as submitted was also in present tense throughout, which I personally find annoying and I suggested changing it to past tense. The writers response, which is very very common was: I’ve spent a year on this and I’m not going to change it. To which I said, “Okay.”

Hear from one of our first time authors