Katie Chambers's Blog

RuleAn ellipsis marks an omission in quoted material, a hesitation, or a thought that trails off unfinished. It isn’t a stand-in for an abrupt interruption.

Omission in quoted material:

Original → We will lower taxes, increase school funding, and cut crime by twenty percent.”

Shortened →The mayor promised to “lower taxes . . . and cut crime by twenty percent.”

Omission in quoted material with a complete sentence:

→ When the omission follows a complete sentence, keep the period on that sentence, then add the spaced ellipsis after it. That gives you four dots total, not a special fourth mark.

Example →  “Sales rose in every region except the Midwest. . . . Analysts expect the trend to continue into next year.”

Trailing off:

“I was going to tell you, but . . . ”

Hesitation:

“I don’t know . . .  maybe.”

Interruption (not trailing off, so it takes an em dash instead):

→ If the speaker fades out on their own, use an ellipsis. If someone or something cuts them off, including themselves, use an em dash.

Example → “I was going to tell you—” “Don’t.”

Styling It

1. Chicago style spaces each of the three periods with a nonbreaking space, then adds a space before and after the group.

All the examples above followed Chicago style, which is the standard in book publishing. However, if an author has a preference, it’s fine to not use Chicago styling for ellipses.

2. Most other style guides group the three periods with no space between them, then add a single space before and after the group. Some authors prefer only the space after the ellipses.

Examples of other styling

She reached for the doorknob … then stopped.

He read the message twice, set the phone down… and picked it right back up.

Practice

Add ellipses (or an em dash, where one fits better) based on how the dialogue is said (noted in parenthesis). Style it however you want. The answers are in Chicago style, but it’s fine to style it differently

“Maybe if I just explained well, everything he’d understand.” (trailing off in middle)“I don’t know.” She stared at the floor. (hesitation)“Wait I think I hear something.” (trailing off in the begining)“If I could just find the right words.” (unfinished thought)“I love you, but.” “Don’t say it. I get it.”The company failed to report the leak, ignored regulator warnings, and continued operations for six more months. (delete a part of the quote for omission)We marched for three days, ran short on rations, and finally reached the river. (some content is omitted here.) I’d do it again; it was worth it.AnswersMaybe if I just explained . . . well, everything he’d understand.“I don’t know . . . ” She stared at the floor.“Wait . . . I think I hear something.”“If I could just find the right words . . . ”“I love you, but—” (em dash, not ellipsis, since she was cut off)The company failed to report the leak . . . and continued operations for six more months.”“We marched for three days ran short on rations, and finally reached the river. . . . I’d do it again; it was worth it.”

I’ve been called the queen of admin by other editors, so I’m all about systems and processes, checklists, and plans. However, I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

But if you have a book to market, then you’ll need some kind of plan. I recognize an extroverted nonfiction author with 5,000 newsletter subscribers is going to build a very different plan than an introverted debut novelist starting from zero.

So I can’t really tell you what to put in your plan, but I can tell you that you need one, and you should start thinking about marketing at least three to four months before your publication date, and ideally even earlier than that.

Buy Self-Editing Essentials for Fiction Buy Self-Editing Essentials for Nonfiction Why a Phased Plan Works Better than a Task List

Most marketing advice comes as one giant list of forty things to do, and that can make marketing feels impossible to so many authors. You stare at it, feel overwhelmed, and do nothing.

A phased plan fixes this because it tells you not just what to do, but when. Instead of doing forty things at once, you’re doing the right five things at the right time.

I break mine into four phases: groundwork, pre-launch, publication, and post-launch. Each phase has a different job.

Identify your publish and launch date

One planning distinction saves a lot of confusion: Your publication day and your launch date aren’t the same thing.

Your publication day is the day you hit publish on your platforms. But you don’t announce that to the world yet. Only your launch team knows you’ve published it. Your launch date is when the book actually goes public. I know it’s confusing that launch team is notified about publishing date, and launch date is when it’s to the public. The idea here is you want to generate sales, reviews, and buzz with help from your launch team before you announce to the public that your book has been published.

That way when the public launch happens, your book already looks established instead of brand new with zero reviews.

Decide on these two dates before you build the rest of your plan. Everything else gets scheduled backward from them.

Creating Your Plan

Before you start, take stock of your needs. If you’re overwhelmed, pick one channel and commit to it for three months before adding another. If you’re introverted, lean into written content over video or in-person events. If you have no audience yet, twenty to fifty engaged early readers is genuinely enough to start with.

With that in mind, create a plan with tasks for each phase.

Phase 1: Groundwork (3 to 4 months out)

This phase is about building the infrastructure your marketing will run on.

To build this part of your plan, ask:

Where does my ideal reader already spend time online?Do I have any way to collect email addresses right now?Who would want to be on my launch team, and how will I find them?

From there, pick two or three foundational pieces to build, not ten. A newsletter signup and a launch team invite list is plenty to start. You can always add more once those two things exist.

Example tasks: setting up your email platform, creating a launch team signup form, drafting your author website copy, creating a one-sheet and/or pitch email for future outreach.

Phase 2: Pre-launch (About 2 months out)

Now you start reaching outward. This phase is where your launch team gets an early copy of your book, and where you start knocking on other people’s doors: podcasters, bloggers, fellow authors, asking for a little bit of their audience’s attention.

To plan this phase, think in terms of asks and timing:

What am I asking people to do (read an ARC, share a post, book me on their show)?How far in advance do I need to ask, given how busy that kind of request usually makes people?What podcasts or other media opportunities are right for my book?

This is also when ARC (advance reader copy) distribution starts, whether through your own launch team or a paid ARC service if you don’t have one yet.

Example tasks that live here: sending ARCs to your launch team, pitching a handful of podcasts, scheduling preorders, collecting reviews for your launch.

Phase 3: Publication and launch (2 weeks out through launch day)

This is the shortest phase on the calendar but the busiest in execution. Your soft launch happens here, followed by your public launch a couple of weeks later.

Decide:

What happens the moment the book goes live for your launch team?What happens on launch day itself?What’s your one big “announce it everywhere” moment going to look like?

Example tasks that live here: sending launch team members their review with instructions on how to post, hosting a launch party, creating and turning on ads.

Phase 4: Post-launch (Ongoing)

Too many authors stop here, and that’s why their sales stop too. A book keeps selling when you keep showing up for it.

Plan this phase differently than the others. Instead of a countdown, build a rhythm: What will you do weekly, monthly, and quarterly to keep your book in front of new readers?

Example tasks that live here: entering book awards, pitching bookstores or libraries, keeping your newsletter going, posting about it on social media, reaching out to more podcasts, applying for promos, seeding your book (giving your book away for free) to strategic people, asking for reviews from people who’ve read your book, applying for and setting up vendor tables.

Once you’ve thought through each phase, put dates on it. Take your launch date, count backward, and drop each task onto an actual calendar. A plan that lives only in your head isn’t a plan.

Tools to Help

If you want somewhere to keep all of this, the tasks, the deadlines, the budget, all in one place instead of six sticky notes and a half-finished spreadsheet, that’s exactly what I built my author management tracker to do. You can create your phased marketing plan, but it also tracks the drafting, the self-editing, and the publishing steps as well as your budget. You can learn more about it here. It costs $29, but if you buy one of my books, you get a coupon code to get it for half off.

If you need help creating your plan, I recommend forword.io, created by ghostwriter and author Jonathan Jordan. You enter in your book details, the platforms you’re on, and information about you, and it creates a phased plan for you.

It’s free to create 30-day plans for up to two books. Or you can sign up for a subscription plan.

Author: $9/mo, 1 book with a full 90-day plan, unlimited 30-day plans

Author Pro: $19/mo, unlimited 90-day play

Conclusion

Marketing demands a plan. You can add or remove tasks from your plan as you go, but you need a plan to get started.

As you go through your marketing, especially in phase 4, don’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. Your book may take longer to gain traction, your tasks may be more long-term wins than short-term.

Just keep chugging along. If you believe in your book and don’t stop marketing, you will find some measure of success.

To get notified whenever I publish a new blog, learn useful writing and publishing tips from other professionals, get discounts on my resources, see what I’m reading and recommending, and learn when I have editing openings, sign up for my newsletter.

I’d love to hear from you. Comment below using any of these prompts to guide you:

What questions do you have?What tasks have moved the needle the most in your marketing?What part of marketing scares you the most?What is one thing you did professionally or personally today that you’re proud of?

Hello, Goodreads friends! I’m Katie Chambers, a developmental editor, copyeditor, former English teacher, and the author of Self-Editing Essentials for Fiction and Self-Editing Essentials for Nonfiction.

I wrote these books for authors who want to publish their best work, and the only way to do that is to self-edit well and then enlist a professional editor.

Think of these books as a practical, approachable self-editing guide in the same family as Renni Browne and David King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and Tiffany Yates Martin’s Intuitive Editing, but with my own teacher/editor-brain spin: structured editing passes, clear examples, and a focus on helping writers see their manuscript more objectively.

My goal is to make the editing process feel less overwhelming and more doable. Instead of trying to fix everything at once, writers can work through story, scene, writing, and technical issues one layer at a time.

I’ll be sharing occasional updates, writing and editing thoughts, and book news on Substack.

Half a string of Christmas lights refusing to turn on is one of life’s small but infuriating problems. You have to find exactly where the connection broke, or scrap the whole strand and start over.

But once you find the break, the fix is usually straightforward. Your plot works the same way. Each event needs to connect to the next, and when that connection breaks, the whole story goes sideways. Readers can feel it even though they can’t name it.

When this happens, you have a cause-and-effect problem.

Request Quote for Fiction Editing or Manuscript CheckupBuy Self-Editing Essentials for Fiction What Is Cause and Effect

Think of cause and effect as the connective tissue of your story. Conflict is the spine that keeps everything upright, and the central plot points are the bones. Without connective tissue linking them, the whole thing goes slack and the story loses its pull.

On the other hand, when the story has strong causality, each event produces conditions or a character makes a choice that makes the next event, the story flows smoothly.

A useful gut check: If you can remove a character’s choice from a scene and nothing changes, or if your plot points could be rearranged without affecting anything downstream, your causal chain needs work.

The chain in action

Take The Lion King. Here’s a version stripped of its causality:

There’s a stampede in a gorge. King Mufasa dies, and Scar takes over. Simba wanders into a jungle. He meets Timon and Pumbaa and has a good time. Years pass. The Pride Lands are dry and struggling. Nala appears in the jungle. Simba goes back home and becomes king.

All the events are there, in the right order. But in this version, they’re just things that happened. One doesn’t cause the next. And though the plot points are the same, the story is boring.

Now watch what changes when causality is restored:

The stampede happens inside a gorge with no escape routes, which is what makes Mufasa’s rescue attempt fatal. Scar convinces Simba he caused his father’s death, driving him to flee in shame. With no rightful ruler, Scar seizes power unchallenged. His exploitative rule drains the land, causing food scarcity severe enough that Nala ventures far from home to find Simba. She forces him to confront what he ran from, and Rafiki’s vision of his father breaks through his denial and compels him to return.

It’s the same story, but since each situation or character choices causes the next one, the events feel inevitable rather than assembled.

How to Test Your Own Chain

List your major plot points in order and ask two questions about each:

What caused this event?What does this event cause?

If you can trace a “this happens because that happened” line through your story, you’re in good shape.

If you hit a moment where the explanation involves words like “coincidence,” “it just worked out,” or honestly, “I needed something dramatic here,” that’s a sign to revise.

Sometimes what you’ll find is that a scene exists because you wanted your character to experience something cool, not because anything in the story warranted it.

That’s a tough thing to discover about a chapter you love, but a scene that doesn’t grow from what came before and doesn’t cause what comes next is doing cosmetic work at best.

It either needs to go or needs to be reworked so it earns its place.

What You’re Really After

A strong causal chain makes your plot tighter and your characters feel real, because real people make choices that have consequences, and those consequences force new ones.

This changes how readers experience your characters. A protagonist things happen to reads as passive, someone the plot is dragging around by the collar. A protagonist whose choices create the plot feels alive. Readers root harder for characters who are genuinely driving toward something, especially when their own decisions are making the road harder.

And when you get the chain right, something almost magical happens to your pacing. Scenes stop feeling like stops on a tour and feel like falling dominoes, causing readers to pick up speed because they sense the momentum, taking them all the way to a satisfying ends.

So trace your chain, find the breaks, and reconnect them or cut what can’t be saved just like a string of Christmas lights, and once you do, your story will shine brightly.

To get notified whenever I publish a new blog, learn useful writing and publishing tips from other professionals, get discounts on my resources, see what I’m reading and recommending, and learn when I have editing openings, sign up for my newsletter.

I’d love to hear from you. Comment below using any of these prompts to guide you:

What questions do you have?When’s the last time you cut a scene because it was cool but didn’t actually earn its place in the story?Try the two-question test on your current WIP: what caused this scene, and what does it cause? Where did it get shaky?Do you outline your causal chain before you draft or find it in revision?

Let’s talk about something that is important to get right: chapter hooks.

Yawn! That’s a boring opening. All I did was tell you what the chapter is about.

How about this one?

If your opening doesn’t grab someone, the rest of your craft never gets a chance to matter.

You need better hooks.

Honestly, social media hooks are the death of me. I can’t capture attention in three seconds flat. Luckily a book gives you a little more breathing room than a TikTok caption. But you have to earn that attention, chapter after chapter.

Okay that is much better!

Request Quote for Fiction Editing or Manuscript CheckupRequest Quote for Nonfiction Editing or Manuscript CheckupWhat Actually Makes a Hook Work

A strong hook:

Asks a thought-provoking questionDrops a powerful quoteShares an interesting statisticDelivers a startling fact or bold statementTells an exciting anecdotePaints a relatable scenario that speaks to your reader’s pain points

Notice that first one says thought-provoking question, not just any question.

When I taught eighth grade, my students loved opening essays with gems like “Have you ever heard of Michael Jordan?” or “Do you like to play Minecraft?”

Yeah … those aren’t hooks. A yes-or-no question causes readers to just shrug and put the book down.

And if you’ve ever opened a chapter with a great quote, then followed it up with content that doesn’t speak to the quote: The quote alone won’t save you. You can’t just drop a quote in and call it good.

One quick clarification too, since I see this mix-up often. A quote sitting at the top of your chapter, separated from your content, is called an epigraph and is not your hook. So if you use epigraphs, don’t think you don’t need hooks.

What this looks like in practice

You can combine hook types, like a thought-provoking questions and quote.

Brad Montague said, “Dreamers are many, but doers are few.” What separates the dreamers from the doers? How can you actively become a doer? You have been told all your life: create a goal, act on it, then create another goal, and act on it, etc. This constant path of creating and then acting will mold you into the person you want to become, bringing lasting happiness.

Or use just one:

Quote:
Steven Spielberg said, “Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.” As Steven noted, cell phones can negatively affect adults who have not had the time to mature and develop their story, so imagine how much this affects the life of a young teenager.

—Notice how I didn’t just drop in the quote. My sentence afterward is about the quote and keeps the momentum going.

Question:

“While cell phones are becoming a given in teenagers’ lives, are they doing more harm than good?”“What would you do if you could play God for a day? That’s exactly what the leaders of the tiny island nation of Guam tried to answer.”

“Spielberg in the Twilight Zone,” Wired, June 1, 2002, https://www.wired.com/2002/06/spielberg/.

“Essay Hooks Ideas,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychology 225, accessed October 22, 2025, https://online225.psych.wisc.edu/wp-c....

Since people are wired to love stories, anecdotes always win unless they’re too long and readers lose patience waiting for you to get to the point.

A bold statement can work too, especially when it pushes against something your reader already believes. Telling someone that everything they’ve learned about productivity is wrong does more to hook them than gently introducing your topic ever could.

Two Real Examples of Weak Hooks (And How to Fix Them)Example 1

“Do you know how to achieve your goals? If you don’t, I will walk you through the five most important steps to achieving your goals.”

Technically, this opens with a question, so someone followed the rule, right? Except it’s a yes-or-no question, and goal-setting content is everywhere. Nothing makes the reader want to keep reading.

A stronger version might lead with a startling fact: ninety-two percent of people never achieve their New Year’s resolutions, and it’s rarely about laziness.

Or it might lead with a sharper question, like asking whether the real problem isn’t motivation but strategy.

Example 2

“Communication is important in relationships. Without good communication, misunderstandings happen and conflicts arise. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to communicate better with your partner so you can have a healthier relationship.”

This reads like a high school thesis statement, technically correct, completely forgettable.

Compare that to opening with a scene: a woman yelling “You’re not listening!” while her partner sits there genuinely confused, certain he was listening.

Readers can picture that moment, and it does more in three sentences than the original paragraph does in five.

[1] “Essay Hooks Ideas,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychology 225, accessed October 22, 2025, https://online225.psych.wisc.edu/wp-c....

Conclusion

Pause at the end of your first paragraph, or your first few, in every chapter and ask whether you’ve actually hooked your reader. If you’re not sure, that’s usually your answer.

Add in a good hook.

Also note the type of hook you’re using. If every single chapter opens with a question, your reader will start to feel the pattern, and patterns are the opposite of surprising. Mix it up.

Now go hook in those readers.

To get notified whenever I publish a new blog, learn useful writing and publishing tips from other professionals, get discounts on my resources, see what I’m reading and recommending, and learn when I have editing openings, sign up for my newsletter.

I’d love to hear from you. Comment below using any of these prompts to guide you:

What questions do you have?What’s your favorite type of chapter hook: a question, a story, a surprising fact, a quote, or something else?Have you ever stopped reading a book because the opening felt slow or uninteresting?Which chapter in your current manuscript has the strongest opening, and why do you think it works?

You can’t fix what you can’t see. The same is true in writing. Vague awareness of your weaknesses isn’t enough. You need patterns, evidence, and specificity to understand what’s actually showing up in your drafts so you can revise with intention instead of guesswork.

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