Panel: How to Prepare Your Manuscript for Publication

Thursday, April 9th, 7:00pm — now on Zoom

See our April newsletter or send us an email for Zoom access details.

Join us on Zoom for our panel of publishing experts. Bring your questions!

Claire Allen will offer tips on how to choose an editor, proofreader, or book designer. Beth Jusino will discuss pitching your manuscript to publishers or directly to readers. Jennifer McCord will represent the publisher’s point of view: 10 things I wish authors knew before submitting a manuscript.

More about our panelists:

After engaging, with varying degrees of success, in careers as a carpenter, stockbroker, and chef, Claire Allen circled back to her lifetime love of words and reading. Armed with a certificate in editing from the UW, she set up a small business checking all sorts of writing for errors of grammar, usage, clarity, logic, and euphony. When it became apparent that many people are nervous in the face of editing, she adopted a gentle, encouraging, and empowering style of editing that has become her hallmark. Her work is based on the idea that all authors and all readers dream of, in the words of Boris Pasternak, “a language so reserved, so unpretentious as to enable the reader or hearer to master the content without noticing the means by which it reached him.”

Beth Jusino has more than twenty years of experience helping writers navigate the complicated space between manuscript and final book. A former literary agent and marketing director, she’s now a writer, developmental editor, and publishing consultant for both traditional and self-publishing authors. She’s the author of the award-winning Walking to the End of the World: A Thousand Miles on the Camino de Santiago and The Author’s Guide to Marketing. Beth is a member of The Authors Guild and the Northwest Editors Guild, and has taught at writers’ conferences and literary festivals around the world. In addition to her website, you can find Beth on Twitter and Instagram.

Jennifer McCord is an editor, educator, writer and publishing consultant in Seattle. Over 25 years, she has worked in many areas of the publishing industry—national book retailers, New York publishers, independent presses, and self-publishers. She has served as advisor or board member to University of Washington Continuum College Writing Programs, Write on the Sound Conference, and as past president and board member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Assn. She works extensively with writers and publishers through her consulting business, Jennifer McCord Associates.