Tag Archives: books

The Shocking Revelation of Editing

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When I write, I can tear through a manuscript pretty quickly. I have more free time as a mother of two who works full time should, and being I can write at my job if I know what I’m writing, I can put words down at a fairly acceptable pace. You would think I could crank out books, and believe me, that is one of my main goals as a writer.

But what holds me up is all the %#!*&$# editing I end up doing. I have to edit a lot because yeah, I’m still learning my craft, (I’ve complained before I feel like I’m skidding my wheels and this is a big reason why) and there’s not a lot I can do to speed that up besides doing what I’m doing. I’m learning not to head-hop, I’m learning how many points of view work in a book. I’m learning to write without all my naughty words. All of these things will help me put out a book that will reduce the amount of editing that I need before I can publish.

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When I have to edit my book, I take a lot of selfies too.

One of the things that took me by surprise was that amount of time it took adding the “set it aside” time everyone recommends before reading it again. I completely understand this, and I do it myself. I’m doing it now, putting aside one manuscript while I write the next, and when I’m done writing it I’ll go back to the first. But doing this takes so much time. Who wants to take so much time? Here you have a completed manuscript, then you read it, and read it again, and even again, fixing things as you go, if you’re lucky to find them, because let’s face it, by the time you read it that many times you know what it says by heart and it could turn to Greek and you wouldn’t even notice. And now you’re supposed to set it aside for a week, a month, whatever. What are you supposed to do? All you want is to publish the darn thing.

After you think you can’t do any more with it, then come the beta readers,  and if they find stuff you missed, you’re at it again. Then maybe you send it to an editor or a proofreader, and then you have to fix those things, too.

It’s nutso and when someone would tell me they’ve been working on their book for two or three or four years, I would just be, forget that I’m not doing that. But guess what? I’m doing it because I have to.

I won’t always have to.

I’m getting better. I’m learning which POVs work best, I’m learning to not head-hop, I’m learning not to write using my naughty word list.

One day I’ll get there, and a 77,000 word novel won’t take me two years to publish because I’ll have all the lessons I’ve learned already in my head as I write a new book, and I won’t have to go back and fix all those mistakes I didn’t know I was making in the first place. My career is just beginning; one day I’ll know what I’m doing.

And that day can’t come soon enough.

More articles on letting your WIP sit so you can read it with fresh eyes:

http://www.hillarydepiano.com/2011/12/i-just-finished-a-novel-what-do-i-do-next-let-it-sit/

http://annerallen.com/finished-your-first-novel-what-to-do-now/

 

Interview with darling Brickley Jules!

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These past few blog posts have been about editing, and today I interviewed Brickley Jules who has had some trouble experience with editors. I asked her some questions about her editing process, and what she went through to get some of her WIPS whipped into shape. Listen in!

Tell our readers what you’ve been working on.

I’ve been working on the next book in the Chrome Thunder series.

I’m curious about your editing process. How much editing do you do before you pass your work on to an editor?

I let it sit for a month or more before I even start editing. Then I read through it taking notes for character cards, setting cards, businesses cards, and a misc. catch everything else set of cards. I use those to add details and check consistency. After that’s done I read through it to catch typos and any plot holes that I may have missed. I fix all that and usually have a panicked epiphany of something I need to change or adjust through the whole novel. An example would be after doing a search I realize I used a word 300 times, and it’s not an invisible word. Finally, I read it out loud or use my laptop to read it to me.

How did you find your editor for Her Unexpected Life? What were your expectations? Had you worked with an editor before that point?

I posted on Facebook that I was looking for editor recommendations. I had no idea what to expect; this was my first experience with an editor.  And actually, I hired them to help me with Out of the Blue, which is still not published. 

How would you rate your experience with that editor?

As a person new to being edited I would give it a five out of ten. Sometimes things took longer than expected, with no deadline for return given. But as a more seasoned person, I would rate it even lower. I was really bothered by never knowing when I’d get my stuff back. Communication was lacking. I received little to no progress reports unless I asked directly, then the answer was vague. 

In your opinion, did she make your novel better? Was there anything she brought to your attention that surprised you? Did she make your writing better overall?

My first novel was crap and needed lots of editing. So, I believe it was made better. I learned I love a sentence fragment. 

Was there any feedback you didn’t agree with?

I questioned some things because it had been a few years since I wrote. (Where did double spaces go?) But for the most part, it was way better than what I started with. I questioned things in general because I was trying to study up as I went.  

Through Facebook you found a different editor for Vested in Her. What made you change editors?

I used my original editor but also used a new one. The major deciding factor was my wait. I waited and waited for drafts to return just to question what was sent back. 

Can you compare their styles? Was this editor better, worse, or the same?

The second editor flat out told me I was being lazy. My other editor never would have said that. I prefer the second one’s approach. I need the honest harsh truth. Deadpool style. 

Cost is always a big factor when hiring out jobs. Was cost a factor for you when you hired these editors?

Yes. I’m on a shoestring budget and have to get the biggest bang for my buck. (The second editor was free but a close fit for my style of writing.)

Going forward, what will you look for in an editor?

Someone not afraid to throw punches.

Can you give our readers a few tips on how to find a good one?

Don’t be like me and just pick the first recommended to you. Ask them to sample edit for you. Ask a lot of them. You’re hiring them. You’re the boss. What would a boss ask and expect of you?

Thank you, Brickley! Finding an editor is a difficult process. I hope you can find someone to mesh with and maintain a strong relationship with that person going forward. I believe we all need editors to put our best work out there.

Please follow Brickley on Facebook and Twitter @BrickleyJules.

You can find Brickley on Amazon and Goodreads. Browse Her Unexpected Life and Vested in Her, now available!

 

 

Don’t Rush to Publish!

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Probably the best advice I can give you about publishing is not to rush.

I’ve always promoted doing as much as you can yourself—especially since your first book is pretty much a loss until you write more and have more books available for purchase. When it’s when it’s your only book available, you’ll never get back what you put into it. (Unless you have a tangible way to measure pride and satisfaction.)

Combining the fact that this is your first book with doing it all on your own is dangerous. You’ll never be sure if your book bombed because you’re an unknown author and this is your first book, or if it’s because your book sucks. Publishing a superior product rather than a POS will take some of the guesswork out of the question.

You want to put your best work out there, so when you have more books available you don’t have to waste time fixing it. Being it is so easy to update files in Kindle Direct Publishing, you may get into the habit of updating your files and covers all the time. It’s a waste and you’ll never move forward. Fixing your files in CreateSpace is easy too, but your book isn’t available until your files are approved, and CreateSpace’s approval time is longer than KDP’s. People still can buy your Kindle book while the new file is being approved, but it will be your old file.

Here are some tips to not rush:

Cover

Never publish your first attempt at making a cover. Make many covers. Many, many, many. Try different pictures, fonts, and color themes. Take your best two or three and turn them into a contest on Facebook or Twitter. Enter all the names of the people who chose the one you decided to use into a drawing and give a signed copy of your book to the winner. Ask for lots of feedback. There are plenty of people online who are willing to give you an honest opinion.

Research your genre, watch picture manipulation videos to learn how to do what you want. If your idea is too much for you to do on your own, or you just can’t get your vision from your head onto the computer, ask for help.  Don’t publish your first attempt. Keep it clean, keep it professional. One day you may change your cover to bump up sales, or because your skills have improved, or because you found a better picture. All I’m saying is, don’t make it a habit. You’re supposed to be writing more books.

Formatting/Book Interior

The inside of your book needn’t change much. As you grow your library you may want to add those books to a list in the front or back matter letting your reader know they are available. Maybe you’ll want to fix typos, but don’t get caught up with this. You’ll never stop editing, and I feel it’s disrespectful to the people who previously bought your book before your fixes.

CreateSpace takes 12-24 hours to approve files, and your book is not available during the approval process. You can lose sales going into it to fix to too many times.

KDP takes five hours, but don’t use this as an excuse to fix every little thing. Plus you want your paperback and Kindle files to match. Publishing your book as close to perfect as possible will save you lots of time in the long run.

Blurb

Changing your book’s description is simple enough, but if you offer a paperback you’ll want your product information to match the blurb on the back of your book. Again, CS has to approve any changes and this takes time. Blurb writing is difficult, every writer loathes it. I find it easier to write blurbs for others than for my own books. Research how to write one and get plenty of feedback from people who both have and have not read your book. The people who have read it can tell you if it’s accurate. The people who have not read your book can tell you if the blurb makes them want to read it.

Editing

I’ve written a lot about editing in my publishing series, and in two prior blog posts. Editing is the worst because of all the waiting, waiting, waiting. For other people. To read your work. You’re waiting on someone (or hopefully many someones) to read your work and you can’t say anything or you’ll seem rude. If you pay someone, hopefully, you come to some kind of a time agreement. If your friends are doing you a favor, you need to be patient. I’ve edited for people who have published before I was done. Please don’t do that—especially if they keep you updated and they are finding things. It’s rude, and frankly, it hurt my feelings. What I advise you to do is forget about publishing it. Work on something new. Work on your cover—can you make it better? Work on your website, or write a few blog posts and schedule them out so you’re ahead. Try to get into a blog tour, or ask some of your friends who run blogs to interview you. Beta-read or edit for someone else. There are plenty of ways to fill your time and still feel like you are moving forward career-wise.

Be patient.

Don’t rush into publishing. It will save you a lot of time down the road, and a lot of regrets, because you’ll never now how many sales you lost because of a poor cover, or your first 20% in the Look Inside feature has typos in it and a potential reader didn’t want to take a chance on the rest of your book.

It took a year or more to write your book. Waiting a bit longer won’t hurt.

What’s your biggest publishing regret?

Do You Really Need an Editor? Er . . . Yes?

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Orna Ross, from the Alliance of Independent Authors, said in a podcast I listened to the other day, and I paraphrase: “Stephen King has an editor. Why would an indie think s/he didn’t need an editor? It’s the biggest mistake an indie author can make.” Or something along those lines. She, with others associated with Alli, have a lot of informational podcasts. You can watch their videos on YouTube, or find them in your podcast app on your smartphone.

I’m an indie author, and I had a few issues with this. First of all, Stephen King doesn’t pay for his own editor. Not out of his own pocket, and certainly not at a loss like most of us just starting out. Secondly, when he puts out a book, a million people read it, and it more than likely will get turned into a movie. Thirdly, because we are one the outside, we don’t know how much of the editor’s advice Mr. King actually takes. Does he take plot advice? When he’s told one of his characters is reading flat, does he fix that character, or does he tell his editor to shove it?

Comparing us to Stephen King didn’t help her make her point.

Or did it?

Indie authors are in need of an editor more than probably anyone. Especially if that book is their first. Or even their second, or their third.

There are different editors out there; they range in duties from helping you plot before you even write your book (that would be more like a writing coach, but developmental editors have their say in your plot) to simply proofreading it before publication.  These types of editors cost hundreds of dollars, and if you’re told you need even more than one of these kinds of editors, it can be intimidating.

I’ve always advocated that an indie author do as much as they can on their own. This isn’t just about being cheap–it’s good business. You are not only an independent author when you write a book, you need to be a self-publisher if you want people to read it. You need to know what you’re doing so you can make good choices for your business. Especially if you’re planning on doing this for the long haul.

(And you can forget about special treatment from a publishing house if you want to get traditionally published. They ask your book be as close to publishable as possible to cut editing costs. It’s not unheard of to hire an editor to edit your manuscript before you query.)

The bottom line is you need someone else to look at your stuff before you publish it. We all learn something new about writing on a daily basis, so your writing will never come out perfectly, and I don’t believe a writer can spot all their own issues. (We all learn, we never stop, so maybe Stephen King does listen to his editor.) That’s where an editor comes in.

That’s not to say you can’t substitute. If you are in a writing group, your critique partner could stand in for a developmental editor.

Maybe your friend who has an English degree and can diagram a sentence with her eyes closed can read your manuscript and look for such things such as subject/verb agreement, faulty sentence structure, and correct word usage.

Maybe your best friend is a prolific reader and can read for typos.

If you can take the criticism as how it’s supposed to be meant,  not an attack on your writing, but rather an honest attempt to help you improve your work, you can learn a lot from the editors and “editors” in your life.

When you compare writing a book to having a baby–nothing could be truer. You don’t birth a baby on your own. You have an OB doctor, nurses, a doula perhaps, your partner, your mother to give you support. You don’t have a baby alone, and you don’t write and publish a book alone, either.

As for actually paying an editor, a real one who knows what they are doing, that is a decision left entirely between you and your pocketbook.

I use a paid editor, but she doesn’t do it as her day job. She’s a fabulous writer, and she’s a fabulous editor. I’ve learned a lot from her feedback, and my writing has improved a lot over the past year. But she’s busy with her own projects and a full-time job, so I’m doubting she’s going to stick with me and my writing career as she is trying to get her own off the ground. I’ll need to find someone else to edit the contemporary romance series I’m going to be publishing in the coming months.

I’ve learned a lot from beta readers and my editor. I’ve also started to read self-editing books to help me recognize my mistakes and cut unnecessary words. I’ve started outlining so my plots are tighter and there’s less chance of plot-holes. I’ve started doing character workups so I can get to know my characters before I write about them. This saves me from writing flat characters.

You are writing a book–a lot of what an editor can and will do for you, you can take into your own hands as you actively learn your craft.

An editor can help you put your best work into the world.

And that’s what we all want.

You can read a great article about editing here.

Damn! I Wish I Was a Writer!

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I’ll be honest. I usually don’t feel like a real writer. I struggle with this on a day to day basis, even though most days I do something in the form of writing, or “writerly” as we like to say. Right now I’m elbow-deep in editing my 2015 Nano project (4th time’s the charm right?); I’m also 40,000 words into the next book in that series. I’ve also just edited for someone. I blog (obviously), which (obviously again) is writing. I listen to podcasts about writing and publishing. I read about writing every chance I get, and yeah, my library is pretty long.

I was chatting with my friend Gareth Young, (find his blog here and his Amazon author page here) about this very topic not long ago. He asked me when people ask me what I do, do I  tell them I’m a writer or do I tell them what I do for my day job? This was over Facebook Messenger so he couldn’t see my jaw drop, but it did. Because only two days before that I had gotten a trim at my salon and of course, the stylist asked me what I did for work. As Gareth pointed out, that could have been a perfect time to tell her about my book, what I was working on, tell her about my email list, and given her a card. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, made a sale.

But I did none of those things.

Why not?

I’ll tweet to more than 8,000 people that I’m a writer, but I can’t tell my hairstylist I wrote a book.  And that it’s for sale. And that she can go on Amazon and buy it.

shocked woman

I thought about this for a long time, and I realized it’s because I only have one book out. Unfortunately, I do not consider that enough proof to say I’m a writer to anyone in my real life.

But I am a writer. I have 150,000 words in the hands of an editor right now. I’m editing a 77,000-word novel that will be released later this year. I’m writing the second book in that series, and I’m 40,000 words into it.

Yet I don’t feel like a writer. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. On any given day I can vent my frustration with normal everyday activities that need to be done: cleaning the bathroom, going to the grocery store, scooping cat litter. Things that only remind me that I am not writing, therefore not publishing, therefore not adding to my proof that yes,  the hour or two I can squeak out of my schedule does add up to something people will be able to buy and eventually add to my backlist of books.

With all this in black and white, I’ve come to realize that I need to separate my actual writing from what I am doing to build my platform. While I may be doing well with my writing, my platform still needs a lot of work, and it will always need time and attention.

So whether you write all day only to put it in a file and slip it under your bed, or you scribble a poem on a cocktail napkin to leave for the bartender, or you’re editing a 4-book high fantasy series, you are a writer.

What you do with it is up to you, but that does not define who you are.

Joanna Penn in her book How to Market a Book (you can find it here) asks you to define your version of success. People define success differently. Maybe it’s publishing one book, maybe it’s having a successful blog. Maybe it really is just finding that one hour a day you can sit with a cup of coffee and your characters.

Success to me will be having a decent backlist I can promote. Maybe enough sales to drop to part-time work so I can write more.

But I have to remember that my definition of success and my definition of being a writer can be exclusive of each other. They have to be, or somewhere along the line, I’ll get discouraged.

Platform-building takes years.

Writing and publishing a book or novella or short story can take as little as a couple of weeks.

My idea of success is where these two things meet in the middle.

Maybe then I’ll feel like a real writer.

When do you feel like a real writer?

Let me know!