Editing This is hard!

For me, at least, writing the book was the easy part! Editing it is proving to be much harder. I don’t have a ton of typos, and I think my grammar is mostly pretty good, but I’m also exceptionally biased and blind to a lot of things at this point.

The wife is giving the book a once over to offer suggestions with pacing and plot. She’s especially keen at latching on to things that don’t make sense, or take her out of the story. That sort of feedback is immensely helpful.

I’ve also decided to take the leap and bring in some professional help. I’ve identified an editor who’s going to help me at first by providing an Editorial Assessment. She won’t waste any time actually fixing parts of my book, but she will provide me with a detailed overview of the good and bad things about the plot, pacing, characters, etc. In addition, she’ll use her experience to suggest what the next steps should be.

From what I understand of the publishing industry, I’ll likely end up spending more on professional editing than I’ll ever make from my book (especially my first one), but I’m willing to invest to turn my novel into something I can be proud of.

I’m sure the feedback on the Editorial Assessment won’t all be rainbows and unicorns, but it will at least provide actionable suggestions that I can use to get this book further down the track. Here’s hoping it’s worthwhile investment!

4 Comments

  1. Jorel

    I always feel like my writing is perfect. And then someone reads it. That’s where all goes downhill. 🙂

    Reply
    1. J. Paul Barnett (Post author)

      Haha. That’s exactly my worry. 🙂

  2. Rob

    You think you’d be willing to post some of the results of the assessment?

    Reply
    1. J. Paul Barnett (Post author)

      Not sure. I don’t know what sort of etiquette there is about that, because it would basically be taking someone else’s work (the editor’s) and then publishing it.

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