Oh lawdy, the other quick's in this thread!
I double-space after periods. I can't break the habit; it's too ingrained (though Twitter is making a good try of it, because I am also long-winded . . .).
I visited a pretty big bookstore (Waterstones) at my local shopping centre last week - haven't been to one in ages - and left feeling a little dejected. There were literally thousands of books, besides from having a promoted display, how is it possible to stand out from the crowd??
Remember, the individual genre sections are much smaller! I always go straight to the SFF section, for instance, and usually have time to browse through a good chunk of it seeing what strikes my fancy.
But most of the time these days I make reading decisions from word of mouth -- recommendations from friends, reviews from book bloggers I like, all that sort of stuff. And then I'll go and order the book, even if it isn't on the shelf. So don't worry too much about not standing out from
everyone -- it's more about the people in your particular audience knowing about you, right? (At least, that's what I keep telling myself.) You don't need market saturation; you just need a few fans who like your book enough to talk about it some.
I'm kind of down on my ability today. I learned I have been making an elementary mistake the entire time I have been writing.
I feel like that's every day for me, so you're not alone. It's why AW is so awesome. It keeps telling me how wrong I am.
Anyhow. Today I got a LBL back from my second first-round beta, and it was in-fucking-credible. As was the LBL from my first beta. Freakin' terrific, the two of them. I just hope I can do their crits justice. (I didn't think about this beforehand, but I almost feel a weird sort of pressure about it, because their crits are so awesomesauce that I feel like I won't deserve their incredible beta excellence if I can't implement their comments in ways that will make the book 1000x better.) And I suck at editing -- but only one way to get better, right? Right.
Still feels surreal that
people who aren't me have read my book. *peeps through hands* They don't know I wrote it, do they?