In today’s literary world you have multiple choices for getting published. But whether you go Traditional Publishing (slim chance), or Self-Publishing (if you can afford it), or Indie Publishing, you still must have a work that is not beset with errors.
All books have errors, but the good ones require a close analysis to find them. Your goal should be to have your book in that category. I am not talking about rough editing. I am talking about revising the book, basic editing of the book, or advanced editing of the book.
What is Rough Editing?
Some writers edit as they write which is what I call rough editing. An example would be you writing a sentence or paragraph and immediately stopping to correct or edit.
This is when your writing juices flow. Editing interrupts that flow. You want to let your writing juices flow with little or no hindrances. You will have time to edit later.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes we write something and immediately see that it is wrong or simply doesn’t work for the story. So, we stop and correct or rewrite.
That is fine on a limited basis, but I would not recommend this as a practice. I once helped a man in writing his book and we were constantly stopping to rewrite, and reorder what was written. It slowed the process down to a crawl.
What is Revising?
Revising is more like the idea of putting in a whole day of writing, then on the following day revisiting what you wrote, reading it and either correcting or rewriting portions.
It is an acceptable form of editing and usually is concerned with obvious misspellings and poor grammar. It might on occasion deal with bigger issues, but again I would recommend that you keep this under control.
What is Basic Editing
Basic Editing, as I understand it, is chapter by chapter editing, and/or end of book editing. I do both. In chapter by chapter, I review previous chapters and edit as needed. This may require a more in-depth review than you were doing before.
Later, when all the chapters have been written, I go back to the beginning and read-through the book. This helps me better understand the flow of the book, the continuity of the plot, and the characters themselves.
The PDFs below cover all this and more.
