Pre-Readers and copy Edits - Part 1
Too many books, including mine, are/were published too soon.
There, I’ve said it. It was a painful lesson, but it’s true. Always true.
The rest of this blog is about my experience with my next novel, The 5th Page.
Once you think you have your book complete, you’re about halfway to the finish line.
I submitted my “completed” manuscript to my publicist, Sherry Frazier, in September of 2015. At the time, the manuscript was 321 pages and 147K words long. I was pleased with it.
Soon Sherry and I were engaged in a series of phone conversations where she read a certain number of pages and gave me ideas and directives. The goal was to flesh-out what I thought was a book, but she considered “a very good outline.”
17 pages of notes and MONTHS later, I finished the next draft. It needed another edit before it was ready for the pre readers. I finally sent a “beta reader ready” manuscript out in April. That version is over 700 pages and 181K words long.
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| The 5th Page "Copy Edit." Almost 3.5" of 8.5x11 inch pages. The CD is shown as a point of reference for the size. |
SPOILER ALERT!
Not everyone who agrees to be a pre reader ends up reading your manuscript.
For a variety of reasons, some pre-readers don’t finish the task. In my case, I got significant feedback from three pre-readers and bits of some quality feedback from about that many others. Four other readers provided comments of varying quality
The good news is the common threads in the feedback I got are helping tighten the book. By the time I’m ready to send it to Kirkus for a review, the manuscript will be shorter and more focused on moving the plot along.
My first novel, Traveler’s HOT L – The Time Traveler’s Resort was printed by KoehlerBooks. When I submitted the manuscript, they commented on the quality of the editing. I did work with two Koehler editors, but I didn’t really think much about what they actually did for my book and me.
I had a laissez-faire attitude about the editing process. I self-published Volume 2 of Traveler’s HOT L without anywhere near adequate editing. After it was up on Amazon, I pulled it and made over 400 corrections. That was a humbling experience.
I paid for a proofread/copy edit with this manuscript. I’ll give you details about the professional proofreader if she agrees to let me do that. She did a magnificent job and caught a gaff in the plotline that only someone with her background would have noticed.
In a nutshell, the editor gave me her parameters she requires when working on a manuscript. I emailed a PDF file of the manuscript to Office Depot. They printed the file. The proofreader picked it up.
All her edits are marked in the left margin with the number of edits on that line. The process was not long. It focused on:
- Consistency in format of titles, places, objects
- Grammatical issues
- Spelling—mostly correct spelling of the wrong form (its, it’s)
- Punctuation: commas, ellipses, hyphenation, capitalization, numbers, etc
So far, I’m averaging one page out of 15 with no marks. Oh, my!
In the next Day In The Life blog, I’ll go into more detail and briefly describe other types of edits you might consider.
Next blog: Copy Edits and other types, too!
e-mail: crd.author@gmail.com
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