Is your Manuscript ready to be Published?
One of the reasons self-publishing originally got its dirty
image was the lack of quality it was associated with. In the early days of
self-publishing, access to quality editors was expensive. Authors who couldn’t
afford good editing couldn’t produce a nice clean product. That reflected badly
on the author and self-publishing in general.
Poor quality is the mark of death for your manuscript. So
the first thing you need to do is make sure your manuscript has been through
critiquing, beta reading, and proofing before you hire an editor.
That’s right, you still need to hire an editor, but only
after you have completed all the suggested steps.
Step 1 - Getting your work critiqued.
Once you’ve finished your first draft, it’s time to find a
group of people to help you work through it.
Critiquing is generally a chapter by chapter review of your work.
Partners in your critiquing group read each chapter and point out parts to
tighten, what doesn’t make sense, plots needing more development, pacing
issues, character inconsistencies, etc.
Most critiquing groups work on a tit-for-tat basis. This
means they critique your work and in exchange you critique theirs. This is
essential as it helps you to learn from others' mistakes while training your
eye to catch them in your own work.
This is the phase where you will spend the most time. During
the critiquing phase your manuscript should go through various drafts and
rewrites. It should look noticeably
different from the original draft you started with.
Your manuscript should be put through a critiquing group at
least once, if not more, before you move on to the next step.
Step 2 - Proofing your work.
After critiquing and rewriting your manuscript, you’ll want
to take another pass at it to make sure it is clean.
Step 3 - Beta Readers
Betas are a fresh set of eyes. They are not an editor and not a critic.
Think of them as your “focus group” for your manuscript. They are the final
step before you move on to editing. These are the people who will tell you,
after all the revisions, if the overall story works.
In the traditional publishing world, editing is taken care
of by multiple people.
A good critiquing group or circle can take care of much of 1
& 2. As I said before, critiquing groups generally work chapter by chapter
and because they work slower, they are usually great for spotting the nitty
gritty stuff. They'll call you out on plot holes, character inconsistencies,
etc.
After you have passed your manuscript through beta readers.
They read your book and essentially proofed it for obvious errors, covering #s
1 & 2 again.
Next, you move on to a freelance editor. This editor takes
care of the final copy-editing. A good freelance editor will usually take a
two-pass approach (at least mine does). They edit a section of the manuscript
and send back editing notes. You go back and correct things based on the notes
and resubmit. The editor then takes another look and makes final tweaks before
sending it back. Then you move on to the next section and so on, If all goes
well, your Manuscript should be very clean.
Optional Step -
Final Proofing via Beta Readers
After the run with an editor, you could send to another Beta
for another read-through which covers your final "proofing."
