Newsletter and Grammar Coach

This month we’re commemorating the 32nd anniversary of the establishment of EditPros — and announcing its retirement. EditPros will close by summer’s end.

The two of us have worked together for 40 years, initially as staff members in a communications unit at the University of California, Davis, before our collaboration as freelance writers prompted us to file legal paperwork that launched EditPros on July 9, 1993.

We set up shop in the laundry room of Marti’s home, with computer equipment on a table that had been intended for folding clothes. Despite the disdainful admonition of one U.S. president who declared, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” — yes, we did. Starting with a roster of three clients, the business slowly but steadily grew, exclusively through personal contacts, cold-calling and referrals. By January 1998 EditPros revenues had increased sufficiently to enable purchase of office furnishings and relocation of the business to a downtown Davis office building — in which we have remained to this day.

During the past four decades, we’ve witnessed and adapted to numerous technological changes. Back in 1985, our IBM Selectric typewriters at UC Davis constituted the state of the art, and our first computers, also IBMs, had monochrome green screens, lacked hard drives, and had to be booted up each day with the MS-DOS operating system on 5-inch floppy disks. We graduated from those to monochrome Macintosh SE units, then during the early years of EditPros progressed through a sequence of new models: the Macintosh SE-30, color Centris, Quadra, Performa, iMac G3, and PowerMac G4 before the emergence of iMacs. We likewise clawed our way through advancements in storage media (beginning with hard 3-inch 1.44-megabyte “diskettes,” 44-megabyte SyQuest removable hard drives, 250-megabyte Iomega Zip Disks and finally large-capacity thumb drives and solid-state backup storage devices) and Internet connectivity technologies (initially with a frustratingly slow 14.4 kbps dial-up modem, then 128 kbps ISDN and 10 mbps DSL before evolving to cable and wireless services).

We've weathered the ebb and flow of economics since then — including recessions in 2001, 2007–09 and the COVID-19 pandemic-induced recession of 2020 — by operating within modest means in order to keep our fees affordable. We also have remained flexible to respond to the needs of our clients, and carefully observed trends. Recognizing the emerging importance of electronic communication, we established the editpros.com web domain in January 1996, at the dawn of commercialization of the Internet. Web design had not yet become a profession, so we learned HTML coding, and built and launched our own website. At that time, our editpros.com site was among only 100,000 online domains worldwide. That’s in contrast to 769 million registered domains in existence today, according to the Domain Name Stat monitoring organization.

In the beginning we envisioned working primarily as editors and proofreaders, but most of the jobs that clients assigned to us were writing projects. Back in the 1990s, we worked mostly on printed projects — primarily magazines, brochures and newsletters, and in the process became interim managing editors for one monthly magazine. During the past decade, we’ve worked primarily on projects for digital distribution, including the written content for other companies’ websites, and on editing academic research papers to prepare them for submission to scholarly journals. Through it all, we have never relied on any artificial intelligence resources.

We became published authors in 1999 when New York-based Billboard Books published Echoes of the Sixties, our first book about the lives of hit-making recording artists. Then we took notice of emerging digital print-on-demand technology that made self-publishing practical. In 2016, building on the experience we gained self-publishing three more of our own books, we launched our BookPrep service to assist writers in self-publishing their manuscripts. Although EditPros will close soon, our graphic designer and editor Marti Childs will continue operating BookPrep as an independent business. Please see the article below for details. And we have begun the process of updating our four books about hit-making recording artists, under one new unifying title. When those books become available, we will announce them here and on the BookPrep website, and on our own Facebook feeds.

Meanwhile, even as EditPros approaches the end of the line, we are accepting a limited number of short-turnaround editing and proofreading assignments. Let us know how we can help you.

We offer our gratitude to the hundreds of EditPros clients who entrusted us to write content for them, to edit or proofread documents that they wrote, and to prepare page layouts, and we thank the many people who recommended our services. EditPros would not have endured for as long as it has if it weren’t for all of you. We sincerely thank you for your trust and your friendship. Farewell.

Sincerely,

Marti Smiley Childs and Jeff March

Despite the impending closure of EditPros LLC, the BookPrep service that we introduced in 2016 will remain in business. Marti Childs, who is our graphic designer as well as an editor, will become the sole proprietor of BookPrep. The change will be imperceptible to authors because Marti alone has done all the aesthetic formatting and technical file preparation for all BookPrep titles throughout the past nine years.

The website will remain https://www.book-prep.com and Marti is planning no immediate changes to the rate structure. Visit the website to see a gallery of books that have been published with the help of BookPrep services. Previously published titles encompass mystery and adventure novels, personal memoirs, company histories, children’s books, emotional and spiritual self-help guides, academic textbooks, career and financial development guides, philosophical and theological volumes, instructional handbooks, literary anthologies, and political history accounts.

Writers who have published their work using BookPrep include teachers, scholars, scientists, military pilots, a physician, a psychic, a social worker and people from other backgrounds..

As part of the BookPrep package, Marti professionally formatted the interior pages of each book, designed covers, and readied them for print publication. The writers were able to choose among numerous book sizes and formatting options: paperback, hardcover, and hardcover with a jacket.

Some of the authors intentionally restricted distribution of their books, making them accessible at wholesale prices only to family members and friends, an option available with BookPrep. For authors who want to make their books available commercially in both print and digital editions, Marti formats and converts the book files into e-books for sale through Amazon (Kindle), Apple (Books), Barnes & Noble (Nook), and Kobo.

With BookPrep, authors determine retail pricing, they retain all literary rights to their books, and they collect 100% of sales royalties. Most important, you will retain absolute control over editorial content as a self-publisher.

We invite you to LEARN MORE about the BookPrep service.

 Tom R. wrote:

“Have grammatical rules changed regarding formation of questions? Or are people just ignoring (or ignorant of) traditional rules? I recall hearing that one of the most important words in advertising is ‘you.’ So I’m surprised by the many ads that omit the word ‘you,’ even when it belongs in a sentence. One commercial that is broadcast several times a day begins, ‘Run a business and not thinking about radio? Think again. Think radio can help your business? Contact iHeart advertising.’ That bothers me because it should be ‘Do you run a business? Do you think radio can help?’ A TV ad for an attorney begins, ‘Have an accident?’ My bottled water supplier sent this message: ‘Primo Brands will deliver your order today. Have empty 3 or 5 gallon bottles? Please leave them out for us to pick up.’ Another often-repeated radio commercial begins, ‘Guys. Tired all the time? Gaining weight? Losing interest?’ I wonder if they’re doing that because they want to sound the way many people talk, or because they don’t know what is correct. What do you think?”

The grammar coach replies:

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