Chad S. White is the author of 5 nonfiction books, including Email Marketing Rules (4th edition), as well as nearly 4,000 blog posts and articles about digital marketing, AI, and other topics. A former journalist, he’s appeared in more than 100 publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and AdAge.
Heeding the advice of Jane Friedman, I launched my author website and my presence on Instagram and Substack a little over a year ago. Since I don’t have a publication date for the first novel in my dystopian sci-fi trilogy yet, my goal has been to connect with other writers and potential future readers. And to learn, learn, learn.
But while I’ve definitely learned a ton, I’m not chasing the algorithm or using AI to auto-generate content. If I learned anything from building my author platform for my nonfiction book series, Email Marketing Rules, it’s that I’m at my best when I’m just myself. I’m not the flashiest or loudest or most entertaining, but people trust me to tell them the facts and share opinions that are rooted in facts and research.
So, I’m just trying to share the things that I’m genuinely excited about and interested in as I pursue my goal of publishing my first novel and becoming a better writer. If that resonates with you, great. If not, c’est la vie.
One of the things that’s been really fascinating to see is that very different content rises to the top on different platforms.
My most-liked Instagram posts
I recently celebrated reaching 1,000 followers on Instagram, where folks most appreciate updates on how my author journey is going.
When suddenly given the option to steal music rather than pay for it, lots of people decided music was too expensive. Music piracy was so pervasive at the beginning of the new millennium, it threatened the entire music industry. Ultimately, it resulted in lawsuits not only against Napster and its creator Shawn Fanning, but against the most egregious individual Napster users, too.
The longer term impact of Napster is that it fueled the transition to digital music sales, where people could buy individual tracks instead of full albums for the first time. And that led to streaming. Both of those moves had huge negative impacts on music sales.
The music industry’s revenues have fallen in half since its peak a quarter century ago when CD albums drove demand. And if you adjust for inflation, that fall looks even worse. Thankfully, live performances and tours allow musicians to still make money, since they now make very little on music sales and royalties.
For those folks who thought piracy was a way to stick it to music labels, they succeeded. But the collateral damage to artists was also high.
‘Not our problem to pay absurd prices’
While the US book publishing industry has fared better than the music industry over the past two decades, it has still shrunk significantly when inflation is accounted for. During that time, the percentage of adults who read for pleasure has fallen, and even fewer read to their children.
Meanwhile, the publishing industry has become very fragile. We learned during the Penguin Random House antitrust trial that only 35% of its books are profitable, with just 4% accounting for the majority of profits.
At the same time, self-publishing has exploded. Since 2023, the majority of Kindle’s Top 400 books have been self-published. That means for those people who steal digital books because they fancy themselves literary Robin Hoods, they’re just as likely to be stealing from indie authors—who make less than $13,000 a year from their writing.
My self-published nonfiction books are pirated all the time, which is super frustrating. It makes you feel powerless.
And, of course, in the age of AI, book piracy has reached new heights.
Why is it okay to steal creative work?
On the one hand, whether we’re talking about AI companies or individuals who pirate books or music or art, they clearly see it as desirable—perhaps even essential. Otherwise, why would they steal it?
But on the other hand, they see it as unreasonably expensive. I wish more people appreciated just how much time and effort goes into creating a book. In that post by Christopher Penn, he mentions it generally takes 6 to 9 months to write a book. On average, that’s probably about right for nonfiction. But it can take much, much longer, especially for fiction—and that doesn’t count the time the author spent learning the trade, or the time of developmental editors or copy editors, or the time given by beta readers, or the often years spent thinking and planning a book. Plus, most authors only make a buck or two on every book sold. Through that lens, books are cheap.
When I think of things that are unreasonably expensive, I think of car repairs, Uber fares during peak times, and any event ticket sold on the secondary market. I’m sure many people feel the same. But they don’t steal those things, because they can’t.
That seems to be the fundamental reason that creative works get stolen. It’s not that they’re unreasonably expensive; it’s that they’re simply much easier to steal than other things. That not only sucks for creators, but for anyone who wants creators to be able to afford to make more great things.
I believe in the evolution of language. Words mean what most people think they mean, because language belongs to the people, not to academics or institutions. The lexicon refuses to be pinned down. Instead, it’s constantly shifting, growing, and changing shape.
While dictionaries are helpful for spellings, they tend to lag on hyphenations and don’t tend to be helpful when it comes to phrasings. My favorite tool for deciding on those issues is Google Trends.
This free tool allows you to see the popularity of a word or phrase over time. As the name implies, it’s great for understanding trends, like the decline in interest in NFTs and the metaverse. But it also allows you to compare the popularity of two or more things.
That makes it handy for making editing decisions.
Let’s play a game.
Which of these is the more common usage?
break out in a cold sweat
break out into a cold sweat
balls his hand
balls his fingers
face-first into the ground
face first into the ground
over-indexed
overindexed
face-down
facedown
face down
mutually assured destruction
mutual assured destruction
Google Trends gives us the answers below. Some are definitive; others less so. Regardless, it’s a helpful tool in understanding what the common usage is.
After doing painting and building maintenance all through high school, my first real job was as an intern at Texas A&M University Press. I helped build indexes and did proofreading. My finest moment was doing the last pass on Galveston and the Great West and catching an “exits” that was supposed to be “exist.” When my internship was over, they gave me a copy of the book of my choice and I chose that one, which I still have.
At the first publisher I worked for, I proofread Galveston and the Great West, which I still have a copy of
I went on to be copy chief at a financial magazine, a managing editor at Condé Nast, and an assistant news editor at Dow Jones. But despite all of that experience editing other people’s work, and as good as I am at catching my own errors, I’ve never relied completely on self-editing.
For each of my five nonfiction books, I hired a professional copyeditor. And for the first novel in my dystopian sci-fi trilogy, I hired a professional copyeditor, too.
Simply put, it’s very, very difficult to catch your own errors. Because you know what the copy is supposed to say, your mind will sometimes fill in missing words, correct incorrect verb tenses, and otherwise trick you into thinking that sentence you just read is fine.
In Good Writing, Neil Allen says, “Editors don’t improve me; they fill in my blind spots.” While he’s speaking more about developmental editors, the same is true of copyeditors and proofreaders. You need fresh eyes to catch your mistakes, and no matter what tips and tricks you use, yours will never be as fresh as someone else’s.
Self-editing tricks
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t self-edit. You should, because the more mistakes and awkward phrasings you can weed out, the better off your manuscript will be when you hand it off.
Two of the self-editing tricks I’ve found to work best are to:
Read your book aloud. It slows you down and engages your sense of hearing, not just sight. It can also give you a much better sense of the cadence and rhythm of your prose, and where you might want to speed things up or slow them down.
Print your book. Going from screen to paper is a change of form that makes the copy seem fresh and new to your brain.
Those help, but obviously aren’t foolproof. Sadly, even with a professional copyeditor, a few mistakes are likely to slip through. That was the case with three of my five nonfiction books. Thankfully, one of the great things about self-publishing is that your book can be updated.
Is error-free realistic?
But even with fixing the small mistakes I’ve heard about, I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a lingering minor mistake somewhere in each of my books. Readers will forgive that. What they won’t forgive is mistake after mistake after mistake.
In a novel I was reading recently, I encountered four errors—a missing period, a wrong name, an incorrect verb tense—in the first 150 pages. I put it down and began reading another book. That’s what hiring a copyeditor is intended to prevent.
The manuscript I gave my copy editor contained more than 600 em dashes. He flagged a bunch. However, only two were for outright removal. Another 20-plus were to be replaced mostly with ellipses, as well as a few commas.
I made all the suggested changes, and even removed or replaced a few more here and there, as I really was misusing them in places.
At the same time, he suggested adding two more—and along the way I added another five.
The continuing backlash against em dashes
I get it: No writer wants their book or article or even social post to look like it was written by AI.
However, the idea that em dash use is a marker to AI use is farcical to me. You know what AI copy also uses a lot of? Commas. And periods. I’m not going to stop using those punctuation marks either.
So, on the question of “Is the em dash still a worthy punctuation mark, or has chatbot output devalued it?” I agree with The New York Times (gift article link) that the em dash is “the people’s punctuation mark.” Now and forever.
Long live em dashes!
(But also, how about those ellipses? We’re not giving them enough credit.)
Author Celeste Ng (left) being interviewed by WBUR’s Robin Young at the WBUR Festival in Boston on May 30
Race was a major theme during the May 30th WBUR Festival interview with Celeste Ng, the author of Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.
Born in Pittsburgh to parents from Hong Kong, she recounted spending many of her school-age years in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where her school had one Jewish kid, one Black kid, and one Asian kid—her. Everyone else was White.
Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the main family in that story is White, although it’s never stated, which raises a lot of questions for some people. Ng said that people tell her, “If you’re Asian, where are all the Asian people [in your stories]?”
For that novel, Ng said she didn’t feel comfortable writing the experience of a Black or Latino mother, but did feel comfortable writing about a poor White mother, as she’d spent lots of time around White mothers in Ohio.
“I have to understand [my characters] well enough so I can portray them fully, or fairly,” she said.
Writing ‘off the page’
To help facilitate that, she does a lot of writing “off the page.” These are character-building exercises that help writers flesh out a character’s background, behaviors, and quirks. Often these consist of authors interviewing their characters to get to know them better. While the vast, vast majority of this content never makes it into the story, it helps crystalize the character in the author’s mind.
Ng has previously said, “Writing is empathy.” And throughout the interview, you could really understand the care and consideration she brings to her writing, including blending her own experiences and feelings with characters who have different experiences than she does.
That resonated with me, as the cast of characters in my dystopian sci-fi trilogy, which is mostly set in Asia, is largely non-White. My novel wouldn’t make any sense if it was full of White characters like me, so I appreciate writers who refuse to be put in a box based on their own race.
Honestly, telling people they can only write about characters who are the same race as them seems kind of racist. That’s an overly narrow interpretation of the “Write what you know” advice. And, as Ng points out, it denies people the opportunity to be more empathetic by putting themselves in other people’s shoes. And the world sorely needs more empathy.
That said, race is a small part of my novel’s world, which is divided into two global superpowers and is much more stratified by social class. But when I do have racial elements, I try to do my homework and act from a position of curiosity.
Besides some verb tense errors and other errors that Word spell check should have caught, my copy editor caught:
A misspelled character name that was wrong in the book, but correct in my book notes
An incorrect title for a character, which was also correct in my book notes
A “right arm” that should be been “left arm,” which created a continuity problem
A couple of “lays” that should have been “lies”; and a “laying” that should have been a “lying”
A “right” that should have been “rite”
A “mulling” that should have been “milling”
A few instances of “his” that should have been “her,” and vice-versa
Was missing am/pm on a reference to time
Was unnecessarily putting commas after interrupted dialogue (i.e., “But I—,” he stammers. >> “But I—” he stammers.)
Sounds like click-clack and clip-clopping that weren’t italicized
Some internal dialogue wasn’t italicized
Inconsistent styling of internal dialogue quotes
My copy editor also flagged a couple of things he wasn’t sure about, which allowed me to clarify those in the text to avoid confusion.
What I didn’t change
My copy editor recommended adding spaces on either side of the many, many em dashes in my novel, but I kept them without. I also didn’t spell out numbers that were 10 or more, or numbers that have units of measurements with them.
Those recommendations are based on The Chicago Manual of Style. As a former journalist, I guess I’ve spent too long following AP Style, which always favors more compact communication. I’m willing to roll the dice on bucking Chicago Style and see what happens down the line.
Spell Check: Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs
I’ve known for a while that Microsoft Word’s Spell & Grammar check isn’t good, especially compared to Google Docs’, which is excellent. However, some of the simple typos and grammar errors that my copy editor found really laid bare how awful Word is at understanding basic grammar. I may need to make a switch for my future novels.
I always imagined myself a plotter. I’m a planner by nature, and manage lots of projects and an extensive calendar in my day job. However, when I started working on book 1 of my dystopian sci-fi trilogy (Project: T.A.G.), a funny thing happened: Despite having a very extensive outline, I found that some of my characters were dictating the action.
I’d get to a point where I wasn’t 100% sure what would happen next or how the next thing would happen and I’d ask myself, What would this character do? It was never the major plot points. It was the stuff in between. And the things my characters decided to do always made my story better.
It was after this had happened numerous times that I read How to Write a Mystery and Robert Lopresti’s contribution about the Rising Island method. Here’s how he describes it:
Excerpt from How to Write a Mystery by Mystery Writers of America
After I read that, I was like, that’s me. That’s how I write. I plan out all the big tentpole events, but there’s some organic pantser action happening in between.
The Third Way
Perhaps it’s time to do away with the plotter-pantser binary and add a new in-between category: the plotser.
That rolls off the tongue more nicely than rising-islander. (Sorry, Robert.)
How to Write a Mystery contains contributions from 73 authors—some of which are essays that are several pages long, while others are a single page or even a single sentence. This allows the book to cover lots of ground, addressing both general novelist issues and, of course, mystery-specific topics.
For instance, it has a great essay by Naomi Hirahara about the pros and cons of different kinds of amateur sleuths. I love a good list. And it has a one-pager by Robert Lopresti about the Rising Island method of writing a novel, which is for folks who are halfway between being a pantser and plotter.
Even if you have no interest in writing a straight-up mystery novel, you’ll find useful advice in this book. I give it 5 stars, 9 dog-ears, and one Post-it.
Things I dog-eared and Post-it’d include:
Naomi Hirahara’s list of different kinds of amateur sleuths (i.e., lawyer, parent of young children, clergy, journalist, and 10 others), including their superpower, challenges, and advantages, along with examples from literature
Susan Vaught’s breakdown of mysteries for different age groups
Chris Grabenstein’s advice on having a diverse cast of characters, and the popularity of “Own Voice” stories
Kelley Armstrong’s tips on profanity, including making up your own in fantasy worlds
Robert Lopresti about the Rising Island method of writing
Greg Herren’s advice on accents and regionalisms (which is essentially that a little bit goes a long way)
Maddee James’ advice about what to include on your author website
