Congratulations! You just finished writing your first novel!
“What do I do next?”
If you’re like I was, that was the first question you asked yourself.
Do you remember what I said last time? In Nine Day Novel: Writing?
Steve, I totally remember: You said, “Bravo! Pop champagne and…”
You remember that part after the champagne about calling someone, right?
Your Editor—the Last Line of Defense.
But editors cost a lot of money. Wouldn’t be helpful if we could minimize some of that expense by doing a little bit of editing ourselves? Before we send it off to an expensive professional?
Don’t make the mistake I did!
After I wrote my first novel, I debated for months between paying an editor and whether I should just “edit” the entire thing myself. After all, how hard it be, right?
Predictably, money won out, and I chose poorly, publishing my first novel before a professional editor had copyedited it.
That was a big mistake.
That one decision set my writing career back about a year. Why? Because my book languished on Amazon as yet another unprofessional, unfinished and unwanted draft, posing as a completely finished novel.
I got discouraged, disappointed and down. It took months before I overcame my fear of what a professional editor would say about my first novel. Because that was the real reason I had edited it myself all along.
A great editor will make your novel shine.
Picture your reader, trying to follow the fantastic story that you painstakingly outlined, researched and wrote. As they read, their eyes are interrupted by misspellings, grammatical errors, improper word usage and dialogue that’s punctuated poorly. Finally, unable to stay engaged through those constant interruptions, they give up and close your book.
We’re not going to let that happen!
Next to a well-designed book cover, your editor will have the single biggest impact on the professional look and feel of your novel. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a little bit of “editing” ourselves. In fact, inside this book, I’ll show you how you can do quite a bit of self-editing before your draft needs to go to an editor. And that’ll save you money.
Removing the mystery about editing.
For many beginning authors, editing is a mysterious and often misunderstood process.
In this book, I’ll define the types of editing you need, outline the parts that you can and should do yourself, and then explain the process that your editor will go through as they clean up what's left.
No idea where to find an editor?
I’ll show you how to find a good one on popular freelancing sites. If that doesn't work, I’ll give you the contact information of my own editor! Then I’ll introduce you to a piece of software that’ll save you countless hours in turnaround time, working with your editor. And I’ll walk you through the steps my writing partner and I use to fix our own drafts before they go to our editor.
Avoiding mistakes: Back to fiction writing basics.
Editing is much easier if you make fewer mistakes in the first place. Seems simple, right? It should be.
For that reason, I felt it was important for this book to have two parts to it: How to clean up what you'd already written … and how to minimize all that cleanup by knowing what and how to write fiction sentences in the first place. So the first half of the book is about editing process and work-flow. And the second half is a refresher course on the very basics of writing fiction sentences.
And the bonuses…
I created tutorial videos to show you exactly how I’ve cut Word loose. How I collaborate directly with my editors inside Scrivener—basic functionality, common editing function replacements, snapshotting and backups.
