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One of the most popular questions that new authors ask is, “How do I know when my book is ready for editing?”

It’s not a simple question of how much space your story takes up. And it’s not as easy as doing a checklist.

It takes a feeling within to know when it’s ready. And it’s not something that anyone else can really tell you.

Watch the video to learn more about how you can “just know” that it’s time to hand it off and get moving on publishing.

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Some people take years to write their books.

How awful, right? Why is this happening?

Some people claim it’s time, but for the most part, it’s either lack of clarity in their message or how to publish, or it’s a lack of belief that the book is ready (which is actually a lack of confidence in their own words).

I had to go there.

We blame a lot of things for our lack of reaching goals, but fear or uncertainty about the correct steps are usually what lead to “I don’t have time.”

So if you’re sitting on a manuscript that is “done” but you “need to make a few more tweaks”  . . . for a few more years, it’s time to ask yourself if you are actually ready for an editor and to finally get that puppy out the door.

How do you know if you’re ready? Make sure you fit the below requirements.

1. You have told the whole story. I get questions all the time about the right number of chapters or the right number of words or pages or whatever. There is a ballpark number you want to hit (not below 20,000 words for a self-help type book), but in all honesty, you want to tell the full story. I’ve seen beautifully crafted, interesting, informative books that are just under that word count. They are impactful and quick-to-read, which might be perfect for your audience. Don’t fill with fluff if you don’t hit that word count. Look at what else you could add to add value to the book, and make sure you have answered all your readers’ potential questions.
2. You’ve actually read what you wrote. Especially if you’ve followed the “write drunk, edit sober” rule, make sure you have read your book in its entirety before you hand it to your editor. You will catch a lot of really obvious things like missing words and sentences that don’t make sense and leave the bigger stuff to your editor to clean and polish. Remember that an editor does more than just insert commas and put their stamp of approval on a text. They also massage message sentences, make sure you don’t have ambiguity, and pull out anything inappropriate either for your audience or for sensitivity reasons (like if you make a comment about old people or something about gender or race that could be misinterpreted). Your editor is there to make sure that you are putting out the best book your possibly can, and cleaning up the little stuff that you can spot easily means that they can step up a level with their cleaning and really make a fantastic book!
3. You’re happy with everything you’ve written. Don’t pass a book to the editor and then keep adding in sections or deciding not to include things. It needs to be done. You won’t get a good edit on the full text unless you stop picking at it while the editor is working their magic. If you’re at a restaurant, you don’t call the server over ten minutes after you ordered  because you “changed your mind” about the dish and decide on the chicken marsala instead of the chicken alfredo and then after that ask for a house salad to add on, even though everyone else already had their salads. You pick something and stick with it. When people find themselves picking at the text after they sent it to the editor, it’s usually because they aren’t confident with what they wrote. Just stop. Your editor will tell you what to change. Give yourself (and the editor) a break. Your part is done, and now it’s their turn.

Absolutely take your time on your book if that’s what is needed, but don’t sit around poking at a text that is done. Find a good editor (contact me if you are a speaker or coach writing a book that needs editing), and embrace the next step. Get published, and finally become an author!

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When writers think of editors, they often picture someone wearing a black pointed hat, devil horns, or a Freddie Krueger mask. They know that editors tear apart manuscripts, and I’ll be honest, no one likes to finish something only to be told that they need to redo part of it (if you have kids and try cleaning your house, then you know what I mean).

But here’s the thing: writers and editors are on the same team. We have the same goal: a fabulous, clean, crisp book that readers will love. Editors are the people who help you look good, which essentially helps you sell more books. (Confusing, messy books don’t get 5 stars.)

So what does an editor do, exactly? For 10 years at my corporate job, people assumed I had a magic wand that made the text they gave me clear and readable. I assure you that’s not the case .

An editor’s job is to make the text cohesive, free from glaring errors (an occasional error may slip by), and focused to achieve the writer’s goal. This can be accomplished several different ways. In my case, I provide two different types of editing services: copy editing and developmental editing.

Let’s step back a second and learn what proofreading is. A copy edit is a step above proofreading. Proofreading involves making sure no words are missing or misspelled, punctuation is correct, and everything makes sense. A proofreader may leave you notes about something that doesn’t make sense, but they won’t fix it.

All those things are usually included in a copy edit, but the editor will also massage the text, remove unnecessary words, tighten, and generally make the text more palatable. When small things need fixed like a sentence that doesn’t make sense, the editor will attempt to fix it and possibly make a note about it being less confusing this way. Generally, text isn’t moved around, unless it’s a small change or it’s bumped down lower in a paragraph, for example.

A developmental edit is a much longer process. It includes everything that the copy edit includes, plus more extensive moving of text, requests for embellishment of certain parts of the text, chopping of sections, comments on how to improve the text, and more. Think of it as a gut and remodel. When I do this, it’s like doing writing coaching and copy editing at the same time. The manuscript will come back bloody and need major revisions. It takes a lot of time, but if you are struggling with your book, this is the way to go.

Please note that neither type of editing should be considered “bad”! These are simply different ways of addressing different problems, much like using a Band-Aid or a cast to fix an injury.

NOTHING should stop you from getting your book out when you have brilliant ideas to share so you can make a bigger impact, and an editor will help you reach your goal. When you’re working on your book, you have to decide for yourself what level of support you want and how you want to handle the editing part of the project. A good editor will be able to recommend what level of editing you need, discuss what is involved, and give you an estimate for cost.

When looking for a coach or editor, you best choice is always word-of-mouth from someone you trust (not just, “My cousin reads a lot of books. She can help.”). If you don’t know anyone offhand, then get in touch with an entrepreneurial community to find out who edits their books. And of course, I’m happy to talk with you about your project and your needs.

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Every word you write is important, especially if you have a word count to meet. But that doesn’t mean that the words are important to take up space.

One of the pieces I’ve been editing started at over 3,000 words. It needs to be no more than 1,300. So how do I make it work? How can I possibly cut the right words and still have it make sense?

This is frequently a place where writers pause. Editing (or killing words that you lovingly cradled in your arms) is a tough job, but the truth is, you can’t be in love with each and every word you write, or somewhere along the way, you’re going to be very upset. Whether you or an editor cuts them, they will be cut. Someone will see a way to tighten them, and it’s best if that someone is you. Why? Because whether you pay an editor by the word or by the hour, you will waste your money if the piece isn’t as tight as you can possibly make it before they get it.

So here are a few “big-picture” things (as opposed to individual words) you can chop out when you need to edit.

• Information about the topic that don’t relate to your purpose. One of the pieces I edited recently was supposed to entice women to attend a certain country club for a golf outing. Sounds simple enough, right? But the writer included stats at the beginning of the piece about how the number of people who regularly play golf has greatly dropped over the last 20 years. That was an easy cut! Why? If your purpose is to encourage people to do something, then why would you want to tell them that fewer people are doing that activity, especially if you aren’t citing a reason for the decline? Don’t muddy the message. The bandwagon approach is an old marketing technique, and it works in the reverse as well. If people aren’t doing something, then maybe it’s not a good idea for you to do it either.
• Phrasing that could be just as effective if it’s summarized. Sometimes we want to talk a lot about a topic we feel passionate about. We may present an idea and then go into several different examples of the idea. But consider whether all those examples are necessary. Personally, I try to keep the number of examples to no more than three, but if the concept can stand alone without the examples, then consider cutting them. When the idea is easy enough to understand, examples aren’t necessary.
• Though the backstory is necessary to talk about where we are today with the topic, this is an excellent place to review for excess verbiage. Often we include details here that don’t matter or extra dialogue or characters that aren’t needed later on in the piece. Remember to stick to the point and give just enough information to set the scene for the rest of the narrative. Don’t tell me every single thing and person on the playground. Don’t tell me the tiny details of the day. If a feeling is important, keep it. Try to focus on the why. If your story is about how you overcame a difficult situation, then focus on what got you into that situation. Remember that people have short attention spans, and they know the intro or the backstory isn’t the meat that they are after.

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My mom showed me a poem once where the last line said, “The typographical error is the olny thing you see.” She spent years typing on a typewriter, so when they read something to correct it, they were usually doing that last layer of editing. No one likes to use white out when they type, so you only changed misspellings or something that affected the way the document would be read.

(I’m so glad we work on computers now so we can obsess about every word!)

But the result is the same. If you print out your document and you missed something in the edit, you can guarantee that it will be in the heading or the largest word on the page or something else equally important.

AND IT WILL STADN OUT!

(Yes, I did that on purpose.)

When I had my corporate job, we did a yearly accomplishments report that was reviewed no less than 8 billion times by the team of writers. We each took a section to review obsessively. Then we traded with another person who would do the same. Then one person on the team read the whole report to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.

The crazy thing is that we were always catching errors, even after publication. No one is perfect, right?

Working on a magazine is a little terrifying in that respect. I shift into different modes multiple times and actually make the page larger and smaller on my screen to make sure I don’t miss any misspellings on the cover. I would feel awful if I missed something that important!

This is why I employ different techniques when I’m editing each article, both before and after the magazine is in layout. Much of this I learned from the writing team I worked with all those years on the accomplishments reports.

(I’m glad to be done with that part of my life, by the way.)

So it’s time to give that last-round editing a shake-up! Check out some of these tricks for catching the last few errors.

1) Time and space.

You need both to be able to edit anything well. If possible, set aside your work for a couple days and leave your desk for this final round. Then come back and do the final review. You will find it much easier to catch mistakes in flow, grammar, subtopics, punctuation, and all the other fun things to edit. Trust me. The best thing you can do is step back from your work and come back to it with fresh eyes.

2) Read aloud.

I know it sounds funny, but you can read what you wrote over and over in your head, and there will still be mistakes. Try a different approach once you think you have it finalized. Read the entire thing aloud to see how it will actually sound. Chances are that you will hear the mistakes that your brain missed in silent reading.

3) Start at the bottom.

Once you have good flow for your piece, start at the bottom of the piece for another review. You can read it paragraph by paragraph and then sentence by sentence to see if the smaller pieces sound ok. Do this through the entire work if it’s something small. For larger works, you may want to do this on parts that took heavy hits in editing to make sure you didn’t miss anything earlier. Sometimes our brains get tired by the time we get to the bottom of our own writing, so we gloss over things that we would see if we were just reading that paragraph. This can fix that problem!

4) Get inked.

Tattoo time! This book is a permanent fixture now, so let’s engrave it on your arm to proudly show the world.

Totally kidding!

Print out the piece you’re working on and read it silently and aloud to check one more time for errors. You would be surprised how many times we read a piece on the computer screen, only to print it and have a glaring, hideous error that seems so obvious that a blind-folded sloth could find it.

When you release your book to the world, you really want to shine, so thoroughly edit the piece to avoid distracting errors!

If you’re looking for more editing tips, check out some of my favorite blog posts about editing.

• Essential Questions for Editing Your Non-Fiction Book

The post Tricks for Editing your Final Draft more Efficiently appeared first on Aurora Corialis Publishing.

It is especially important for writers who are self-publishing.

The rest of the independent writing community wants to be taken seriously, and writers whose work is riddled with errors make all of us look like amateurs. At the absolute minimum, you should have someone review your work for grammar, punctuation, and missing words, known as a “copy edit.” Preferably, you should ask for a developmental edit from a seasoned expert to make recommendations for flow, moving text, tightening verbiage, etc. (all my favorite things to do to a manuscript!).

And you have to pay them.

I was on a thread on Facebook recently where a handful of editors were practically selling their souls for the ability to edit one freelancer’s manuscript. “I have the lowest rates around.” “I can do $200 for 50k words.” “I love to edit, so I’ll do it for $500.” No one even asked what kind of edit the writer needed before they pitched prices. It really made me sad. I wonder if hair stylists or mechanics or mowing businesses would conduct themselves the same way.

We are always looking for bargains, especially when we are funding our way to that dream publication. However, bargain editing may not be the answer. Ever had a bargain haircut? Would you risk it again? Look at your writing the same way. You are presenting it to the public, and though you may have a good story, errors in grammar, punctuation, usage, flow, repetition, etc. may be just as distracting as your crooked bangs.

(I will add that you may find a real gem of an editor for cheap! I got a haircut once at a beauty school for $4, but the girl who cut my hair was excellent. She was recommended by a friend, though. I don’t know that I would have gambled my appearance if I didn’t know ahead of time that she knew what she was doing!)

Let me break it down for you. (I’m sorry, but I have to use math.) Let’s say that you let someone copy edit your 50,000 word manuscript for $200. I did a Google search and discovered that the average person reads about 200–300 words per minute.  It would take this person 2.8–4.2 hours to read the manuscript once, which means they are making $48–$71 for their effort. Sounds like great, easy money for them and not a big budget-buster for you, right? But if someone is reading that fast, are they really catching all the errors?

When I edit something, I read slower than when I’m reading for enjoyment. For a developmental edit, I’m lucky to get through 5 pages in one hour. Even a copy edit goes slowly because I want to make sure my brain isn’t supplying missing words or glossing over incorrect punctuation or spelling. Also, I always read everything at least twice. If I’m editing a press release, I may read it through three or four times to make sure it’s clean. If I’m editing a novel, I start at the beginning and read to the end twice. This helps ensure that I pick up as many errors as possible, and it keeps me from getting distracted by your compelling story.

When you are looking for an editor, be cautious. Find out their experience. Word of mouth is the best way to find quality work.

And keep in mind that you are paying for their education and experience. You are paying for their undivided, serious attention to your manuscript. Editors are experts who can help you polish your prose, not just another way to sucker money out of poor, unsuspecting writers. We are here to help!

If you find this topic interesting but are looking for a bit of dry wit, some adventurous editing, and a main character who takes her online dating with a red pen and a martini, then please check out my book Confessions of the Editor Brigand, either in paperback or eReader version.

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