Advice for Authors: Editing

Daily Diary, Tuesday, August 15, 2023 Day 1080

This post is primarily directed at those of you who are writers and are considering or involved in self-publishing fiction (although even authors committed to the traditional path can use some of this information.) However, I know that most of you who subscribe to this newsletter are not writers but seem to enjoy learning about what the whole process of writing and publishing is like, so this is for you as well.

If you have been following my daily posts over the past year, you have twice watched me go through the various stages of editing that occur between completing my first draft and publishing the finished manuscript, once for my novel, Tides of Acerba, and once for the new novella, Dandy and the Dognappers. Although the novel was nearly 140,000 words, and the novella is only about 26,000 words, the editing process for me is pretty much the same.  

Here are the editing stages my books go through. First, once the first draft is complete, I do an initial self-edit. This doesn’t mean I didn’t do some editing as I went along. I find it difficult not to reread and tweak what I wrote the previous day, but this is the stage where I read through and edit the entire manuscript. Some of you will remember that I did a lot of cutting during this first edit of Tides of Acerba.

After this first edit of the whole manuscript, my husband usually reads it to make sure I haven’t done something awful like lose a whole chapter in formatting the draft to send, or commit some terrible continuity mistake like changing a character’s name midway through the story.

Then I send this draft off to beta readers to get feedback, primarily on setting, plot, pacing, character development, and continuity. (They also give me feedback on what has worked for them, which is helpful as well.)

I devote the next major edit on correcting those problems they found. For example, in this last novella, several people were surprised at the attitude of one of the characters, and this prompted me to provide a little more background to provide context.

If you look at the graphic above, you will see that what I am doing (and my beta readers are helping me do) at this stage is a developmental edit. This graphic is from an excellent post on self-editing on the Alliance of Independent Authors’ blog.

After I feel comfortable that I have addressed the issues that came up in this first round of edits, I send my manuscript to one or two people to do what is generally called a copy edit. Early on in my writing, I might get more detailed feedback during this copy edit, for example, problems with dialog, person and tense. In the graphic, this would fall under the definition if line-editing, Now, after having written a total of twenty-seven books, twelve of them full-length novels, I don’t make many of these kinds of errors any more (or I notice them myself in self-editing), and my copy editors are mostly helpful in pointing out common grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors, and suggesting where I have fallen into bad habits (over using words or phrases) or where certain sentences can be improved. In short, this is a stage where they help me polish my prose.

Finally, I send the manuscript to my professional proofreader, who I pay to do this last part of the editing process.

You would think after all this, the manuscript wouldn’t need to be proofread, but my experience says differently. Despite the fact that all along the process, many of my beta readers, even those working on the developmental editing stage, will point out typos and grammatical errors, and despite the fact that every time I read through the manuscript I find errors as well, the proofreader still finds typos and comma errors.

And, even after all that, I will still have readers who find a few typos. I am always happy when a reader points one of these errors out, since it is so easy to correct and upload a clean copy as an ebook. But, I am equally happy that this occurs less and less often.

While I only pay my proofreader, (having been very fortunate over the years to have people who have volunteered to give me their time and expertise in the developmental and copy editing stages), this doesn’t mean that every self-published author needs to make the same choices I do. In fact, along with paying for a professionally made cover, paying a professional editor is often the key piece of advice given to most self-published authors. And lots of self-published authors swear that their professional editors are the key their ultimate success and well-worth the cost.

Interestingly, authors who choose to take the path to get a traditional publishing contract for their fiction will often give as their primary reason for doing so the fact that their publisher will edit their book. Yet, from what many of these traditionally published authors have shared, particularly those early on in their careers, most of their manuscripts have gone through several levels of editing before the publishers gets their hands on it, including the use of beta readers, professional free-lance editors, and agents who give editing advice. See this article on How to Survive Editing.

In addition, no matter if a writer is self-published and/or traditionally published, what a particular author requires in terms of editing can evolve over time. This has certainly happened to me and has influenced who I turn to for beta readers.

With my first books, my beta readers were primarily the published writers from the writers’ group I had belonged to for decades, plus a couple of friends and family members. The writers, who were all mystery writers, were extremely helpful with things like plot and pacing and helping me with the common problems of a new fiction writer, like head hopping (ie shifting out of the head of the point of view character.)

It is quite common for authors to volunteer to be beta readers for each other, and one of the best educations in the craft of writing I have gotten over the years, wasn’t just from the input from these other writers, but also the experience of doing a developmental edit for them in exchange.

As for the other early beta readers, a couple were friends who were also historians, and this helped reassure me that I was doing a good job of integrating historical fact into my fiction. As a professional historian, I was confident of those facts, but deciding what to put in (or leave out) in terms of historical detail is a difficult task, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving a distorted view of the past by my choices.

Finally, one of my first beta readers was a friend who simply liked the kinds of light fiction I did, so I could and still trust that if I got the mix of mystery, history, and romance right (or wrong) he would tell me.

However, over time I also started to get fans of my two series who volunteered to beta read, and I began to put together several teams of readers, depending on their particular strengths. For example, I discovered that some of the early authors who volunteered to beta read didn’t work as well for the developmental stage since they didn’t much like the light, cozy style of my books, and this meant that they might ask me to cut the very scenes that the fans of the series liked. On the other hand, they were very good at the line-editing or copy-editing stage.

In contrast, the beta readers who come to me as fans of the series are great at telling me when I don’t get the mix of history, mystery, and romance right, when I need more or less background on a character, and when the pacing works. This means they are very helpful at the developmental edit stage. They also often bring unique experiences (like living in San Francisco, having a legal background, or being familiar with horses or textiles) that mean they have been able to address the accuracy of those elements of the stories.

My process of gathering a core group of beta readers for the developmental stage of editing for my science fiction series has been similar to the process I have gone through for the historical mystery series. Initially I relied on getting feedback from other authors who were writing stories in the shared world of the Paradisi Chronicles I had helped create. I also helped edit many of their manuscripts, which like my early experience editing mysteries written by my writers group, improved my own writing in a genre I hadn’t written in before.

However, since the publication of the first book in my Caelestis series, my beta readers have come primarily from those people who were already fans of my mystery series, and then became fans of the science fiction series. Some of them were already science fiction fans and can give me feedback based on this experience, but even more useful is the fact that their input ensures that fans of my mystery series will find many of the same elements they like in the science fiction stories. When a positive review mentions that a reader normally does’t read science fiction, that they found the science fiction books because they like my mysteries, and that they were pleasantly surprised, then I know my beta readers for the science fiction series have done a good job of giving me the feedback I need.

In short, (which is ironical, because this has turned out to be a much longer post than I anticipated) beta readers have been a crucial element of the success of my fiction in producing books with strong sales and reviews.

I don’t want to be prescriptive and say that every writer should follow the same edition path I have followed in ensuring my work is well-edited before it is published, or even to say everyone should use beta readers at some stage. I would simply recommend that you also read this article that discusses beta readers and the multiple ways they can be used in the editing process.

For those of you who are not writers, but readers, I hope you found this long description of the process interesting and comprehensible. And any faults can be blamed on then fact that this post, like all my substack posts, hasn’t had the benefit of beta readers (smile.)

I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. If you have received this newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, it is either because you subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you are in the latter camp, and want to subscribe, just click on the handy button below. If you are interested in seeing what other posts I have done on my journey as an indie writers, Click Here.