Hosted by Wayne Jones
Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Writing & Editing. This is episode 147, which is 0.00159 Scaramuccis long. My guest is Neil Berliner, who is a comedy writer and coach. In his career, he’s also performed standup, and his writing has appeared in media from Mad Magazine to the New York Times to the Village Voice. He’s now also an author, having co-written the Ha Ha History joke book, which was published in January.
Wayne provides details about how the various parts of a self-published book should generally be organized, drawing on information in three style manuals. You can find a PDF with all the details here.
This episode consists of an interview I did of Mike Oppenheim, whose day job is compiling back-of-the-book indexes. I was interested in some of the nitty-gritty of practical indexing, and Mike came through with the details. He does a lot more than indexing though: he writes, podcasts, and makes music. He has a podcast about death with the great title of Coffin Talk, which I am looking forward to bingeing on a bit.
He’s published three novels and has a slew of other accomplishments. And yet with all of that he was super easy to talk to, explained things well, and had a great sense of humour.
If you’re looking for more info about him, check out his website at mikeyopp.com.
Have a listen to our conversation and find out a bit about those pages at the end of a book that can be so helpful to you …
This episode of Editing Writing is an interview I did with Emily Enger. She runs a marketing service for writers of all kinds—though perhaps mostly those who have self-published or have published with a small press—called Good Enough Book Marketing. She’s a book marketing coach, and as she puts it, she is “helping authors cut through the marketing noise to stay true to their first calling of writing great books.”
If you want to find out more about her, or sign up for her service, check out her website.
Wayne discusses in general how it's inappropriate to make comparisons between versions of the same work done in two different art forms, and then talks about some of his favourites: American Psycho; Hamlet; Glengarry Glen Ross; A Clockwork Orange; and The Exorcist.
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