People often ask me what is it that I do for a living. I actually do many things but they all have a common link: words. I put words on paper and on the Web, for myself and for others.

So, what is it that I do for a living? I think this definition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary pretty much sums it up: Wordsmith: a person who works with words; especially: a skillful writer.

As a wordsmith, my skills are in:

Bookmaking: No gambling involved, other than the gamble all authors take when they write a book. In this context, the type of bookmaking I do for authors includes:

  • Book Editing: An author loses credibility when their book contains misspelled words, improper grammar, or doesn’t have a consistent ‘voice’ or theme. Light editing is correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation. Heavy editing is doing a major rewrite of the author’s words. Ghostwriting is writing books for authors who have a story to tell but who don’t have the time, or don’t have the skill, to write it themselves. 
  • Book Design: A good story needs to be matched with the right page layout, typography, cover design, and interior graphics. Should it be paperback or hardcover; a small page size, 5×8 or 6×9, or larger?
  • Book Production: Typesetting, incorporating design elements and front matter, and making the book press-ready for the printer or for distribution as an e-book.

Self-Publishing: My first book, How to Survive Your Husband’s Midlife Crisis, was published in 2003 by Perigee, a division of Penguin Putnam. The photos at the top of the page are from media appearances when the book was first released which included The Today Show with my co-author Gay Courter and her husband Phil, Naked New York with Bob Berkowitz, and Norwalk’s News 12 .

Since that time, I have self-published five more books. The Amazon widget at the bottom of this page includes all six of my books plus books that I have helped other authors self-publish. Self-publishing eliminates the need for an agent (to present the author’s book to publishing houses, negotiate terms, and act as intermediary between author and publisher), a book proposal for non-fiction books (sometimes harder to write than the actual book), and the lengthy process through editors, copy editors, marketing reps, graphic artists, and typesetters.

I am currently working on a book to show authors, step by step, how to publish their own books. The first few chapters are at BeAPublisher.com.

Web Publishing & Design: Since 1996, I have created websites for a variety of businesses, organizations, and individuals. Some were fairly complex, others were very simple. My goal as a web designer has always been to create sites that are easy for visitors to use and that are optimized for indexing by search engines. I prefer creating starter sites then teaching the owners how to use online editing programs instead of keeping me on their payroll.

My own sites focus primarily on relationship issues such as dating (Friends and Lovers the Relationships Guide), Divorce Support (also at Friends and Lovers) , and midlife crisis (The Midlife Club). These sites, combined, get more than one million page views each month.

–Pat Gaudette