So Your Book Just Got Edited…

[ursulav]

Enough people made vaguely interested noises in the editing process that I thought I’d talk about it a bit. It’s definitely the tedious, grim, discouraging bit of the process, but it occurs to me that you, O Prospective Author, may find it even more traumatic if nobody tells you what to expect!

First, two caveats. I’ve had…I think…twelve books

Comments

[shashalnikya]

I've gone through the editing process on three novels (and lots of short stories and other work), and yup, this sounds familiar! I will say that it was a completely different experience each time I did it

[sheherazahde]

A bit of unsolicited advice from someone who can't write fiction to save her life.

Have you read toddalcott's Journal? He dissects screenplays, but his observations are good for any story writing. His observations have helped me to better understand many stories. beginning with the question "Who is the protagonist and what do they want?".

[spiral_face]

I'm fresh out of college as of two days ago with a Professional Writing degree in my hand, and this taught me more in ten minutes of reading than I had all semester with my English Capstone course. I'm pretty terrified of submitting my first manuscripts for editing, but at the same time knowing that the process is scary no matter how good you are - and if one of my writing idols faces giant editing projects, I can face it with hopefully the same level of aplomb. Thank you for sharing this.

[badger]

If you ever want to hear what my nonfiction publishing edit cycles were like, I'll tell you about them sometime. :)

[blacktigr]

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. :)

[bladespark]

If this really is typical of editing, then getting edited by my husband is surprisingly like the professional deal. :D Although he is probably a bit more free with just telling me what to add than this. It's less traumatic-sounding than I might have thought, really. Maybe someday I will actually bother to send something in to somebody.

[archangelbeth]

Nifty!

Now I want an editor of my very own. I need to look into their flat rates. (Since I don't think I can get away with locking one in the basement when we haven't even finished finishing it yet, and it still smells rather of paint, and there's no bathroom.)

[singingnettle]

Erm...ahem...If it's not unforgivably market-y to say this...this is what I do for a living, and I do it pretty much the way Ursulav describes. Shoot me an e at my LJ addy if you want to talk about it

Thank you!

[archangelbeth]

At the moment, the funds that I was using to pay off the covers of what I've got right now... well, a friend needed $300 for car payments, so there went that. *sigh* So while I'm interested in price-quotes, I'm not necessarily flush enough to do much. At the moment. O:(

I'm also skittish in general, since the last time I had anyone "critiquing" my fiction, it was in a really awful "writing fiction" college class, and I didn't write anything for a year after. (Fanfic brought me back, woo!) So, y'know, wild author... no sudden moves... >_>

(Ironically, I've done some editing of my own as well -- though for tabletop RPG stuff, not fiction. That and beta-readers have let me limp along... *wry* )

*bookmarks this post for more reasons than one*

Oh, and there is a bathroom just up the stairs and to the left, with a shower and tub, even! O;D

Re: Thank you!

[singingnettle]

If you decide you want to pursue editing, my suggestion is that you start looking well in advance anyway. Good editors can be booked out (that is, committed to previously scheduled projects) as long as two years in advance. (Although personally I don't book out more than six months, because I think it's just silly to wait for two years to get your stuff edited. Having done this for 25 years, I'm pretty prosaic about this whole process.)

And yeah, it's kind of inherently hard to accept criticism on one's writing, I think. I've published (or rather, they've been published for me) several books and short stories and virtual reams of consumer and technical products and documentation and oh, all kinds of things, and the edits I get back tend to be pretty minimal...but I still wail (briefly and inside my head) over the injustice, the INJUSTICE, I tell you, of every one. :->