The Long Road Part Two - Editing

THE LONG ROAD TO SELF-PUBLICATION

“Five Ferries took 39 years to write & 16 months for everything else.”

Part 2 – Editing 

After nearly 40 years of effort, I published Five Ferries, my first novel. The writing took up most of this time, but in the last year and a half I entered the world of self-publication, and this is a story in itself.

In May 2017 a friend from the publishing field said I should not realistically expect a publishing house to sign me up. Publishers have limited budgets to market titles, so as a first-time, non-celebrity author writing in the common roman a clef genre, I would have difficulty finding and motivating an agent or successfully submitting an unsolicited manuscript. A publisher would prefer to back a young author with online followers, rather than someone with no social media presence who took 40 years to write his first book. This would assure built in marketing and give the publisher the possible upside of many more books from the same author.

I decided to try self-publishing and started looking for a professional editor. Several leads proved unfruitful and then my publishing friend suggested the website for the Freelance Editors Association. I sent the site a short paragraph about my manuscript and the help I wanted, with my email address and phone number. The administrator contacted me next day to suggest I might not want to include a phone number, “because you’re likely to get a lot of calls.” I deleted the phone number, the notice went up, and within 24 hours I had a hundred responses. These emails didn’t simply ask for the job. Each included details of the applicant’s experience in writing and editing, listed published works, volunteered thoughts about editing, and included links to articles, blogs, references and resumes.

My first reaction was urgently to direct the association to take down my notice. Next, I went back to my industry friend. He explained that any good editor would tell me I first needed a “developmental edit,” which would address big-picture issues like reordering chapters, developing characters, and deleting superfluous scenes. Then I would need a “line edit” to address sentence structure and word choice. Finally, I would need a different professional to proofread, line-by-line and word-by-word. My friend thought my editor should be a woman, since the story likely already had enough testosterone, and that it wouldn’t matter where the editor lived, since our communication would be by email or phone. His most important advice was to pick the editor “least likely to blow smoke up your ass.” 

I have never felt as good about my writing as I did reading the editors’ submissions. From the brief paragraph I had posted, applicants were convinced I had written the great American novel. I read each such submission, patted myself on the back, and deleted the email. This eliminated sixty of the applicants. From there I looked for who correctly explained the kinds of edits I would need—despite what I had asked for. I ignored the gender and location of the editors.

This got me down to nine candidates. I bcc’d them all on an email attaching a synopsis, two sample chapters, and a Word version of my first seven pages. I asked for an estimate (in total cost, not a hourly rate) for a developmental and line edit of 98,000 words, and a sample edit of any part of the first seven pages. Six editors responded with sample edits and cost estimates—ranging from $1,300 to $10,000 

I spent the next two weeks going through the comments from the six editors. This was slow work, but I loved it! For the first time in all the years, serious readers were focused on my work and how to make it better. If one editor made a comment, I might accept it or I might not, though it would provoke me to think; if three editors made the same comment, I had to believe they were right.

One of the six editors, Christine Keleny of CKBooks Publishing,  moved five paragraphs from page six to the start the book. After figuring out what she had done, I realized this was just what was needed. That editor also ran her own publishing operation and was available to help with later steps. I hired her and sent her the full manuscript. A month later she returned my 16 separate chapters as a single formatted book, with edits and lots of embedded comments. She wanted to see more development of the main story arcs. She asked for more physical description of settings. She thought some scenes didn’t advance the story and shut be cut.

I incorporated what made sense to me, and inserted my own comments back to explain what I was getting at. A few weeks later, she sent another markup, this time more of a line edit but including additional structural comments. After I repeated the process at my end, she told me her work was done and it was time to turn to beta readers.

A “beta reader” hasn’t yet read the manuscript but is willing to read it and comment. I asked seven likely suspects for help. My editor also connected me with four of her clients, all of whom agreed to give me comments—two if I would in turn edit their manuscripts. Her clients were not only authors themselves, but one was English and another Irish, which gave me native views on settings and dialects.

Online blogs about the beta round suggested setting up a survey on Google Docs with the questions most of interest to me, such as about reactions to specific characters and incidents. I included a link to the questionnaire when I emailed the manuscript to the volunteers, but asked for comments in any form that worked best for them.  I also asked their consent for me to thank them in my acknowledgements.

Eight of the volunteers actually read the manuscript, and six of these returned detailed comments, in Track Changes, through responses to the survey questionnaire, or through paragraphs addressing concepts in the book. My piano tuner answered every question in the survey, and included a list of typos and a list of his favorite quotes from the book! Over two months, I incorporated many corrections and ideas. It was amusing when one reader loved something while another hated it, but all the comments showed how the book came across to readers.

In February 2018 I hired my editor to go through the manuscript again. Once more she was a great help. However, seeing how instructive the comments had been from my English, Irish and French readers, I also set out to solicit country-specific editing from natives of all countries where the story was set or from which major characters originated. I broke down the manuscript by country and tracked down help with the Australian and New Zealand slang, and linguistic and cultural aspects of Germany, Switzerland and Catalonia.

I then read the manuscript twice more and concluded it was time to send my baby into the world. I had no idea how much work remained to be done.

See Part III – Making a Novel into a Book

Editing Resources:
Freelance Editors Association:  https://www.the-efa.org/

Self-edit your manuscript:  https://thewritelife.com/self-editing-basics/

The three stages of editing: http://www.ontimetyping.com/blog/the-three-stages-of-editing

Post an editing job: https://www.the-efa.org/hiring/job-submission-form/

Create an online questionnaire: https://www.google.com/docs/about/

Separate essay on<wmrauthor.com>: “The Better Beta”