Chapter 12: I’m taking a sledgehammer to my book
Typos, plot holes, poor character development… all gone!
This week was painful, but in a good way. After a week off, I’ve revisiting my first draft. This time off has been necessary; It’s my first time writing a book and I was close to burning out. I’m refueling to write Book #2 in a couple weeks time.
So why was this week painful? Because I was editing my manuscript. This involved reading through my book in its ugly state. I marvelled at how many errors of all kinds there were: typos, grammar errors, capitalizations that weren’t there, etc. In other words, pretty cringeworthy. But I made sure to take it in my stride. “Pain is good,” I told myself.
There was also an additional level of pain in the process itself. I’m onto my fourth draft and it’s taken hours to go through it so far. The first run took about two and a half days. This was reading and just picking out the biggest problems, things like plot, character development, etc. I cut 2,000+ words from an 80,000 word manuscript.
Then the second time round I ran it through Grammarly. It’s a handy tool that picked out a lot of the smaller errors that would distract any reader trying to get into a story. I also learnt a lot about how to punctuate dialogue, which I must confess I didn’t really know how to do before writing a book.
The third time around I turned on the “show non-printing characters” button, denoted by a ¶. This really handy feature helped me find where I had forgotten to put a space after a period. There were more than I thought, which sucked. Still, I’m glad that I picked it up and not my readers.
There’s still one more important step, which is putting it into Vellum. Vellum is a Mac-based software that formats manuscripts into beautiful ready-to-sell books. I’ll take my cover that I showed you from a couple weeks back, put in some cover copy, etc and voila! I’ll have a file that will be ready to export into a file that I can upload to Amazon.
That will be really exciting when it happens. It’s like getting the first print version of a book off the printer and holding it in my hands. I’m just focusing on digital this time round, but seeing what my readers would see in the finished product will be an achievement in of itself before it even sells.
This process has been really important for me to do not just because of the pain, but because it’s shown me why professional indie authors have dedicated editors. It’s a laborious process that is good to experience to understand how much work goes into a book before it’s sold. However, my goal is to have my own editor in the future. Probably not this year, though.
This means I’ll continue to edit my own books until the end of the series. I’m find with doing this. Since I don’t really enjoy the editing process, this will force me to write cleaner manuscripts. It will also help me focus on addressing the biggest parts of the book up front so they don’t cause problems later, i.e. character and plot development. What this in turn means is having a better outline at the beginning.
This is a nice segue into next week: I’ll be outlining Book #2 and continuing Rose Eaving’s story. Throughout August, I’ll be writing Book #2 with a goal to finish it by the start of September. It feels so far away right now, but it’s exciting for me to imagine having that finished manuscript of Book #2 on the screen. Why? Because it means I’m one book closer to publishing my first.
Anyway, that’s it from me this week. Thanks for following and supporting!
-J.
