This Writing Life 9: More Editing and Editors, or More Than Just Copy vs Substantive

(Sorry this one is a late. I was sick. I'll be blogging about health next week.)

Last week we talked about why you need an editor. And you do. Sometimes a publisher supplies the editor, sometimes you want a piece edited before it goes to the publisher, or to the agent you are trying to get.  If you are self-publishing you definitely need an editor. And if you don’t think you do, don’t self-publish, ever.  Seriously.

That said, different editors have different skillsets, and in order to know which editor is best for you, it’s best to know which skills editors offer.

The Editing Editors Do When They Edit

When writers think of editors, we tend to think about two types, Copyeditors and Substantive Editors. Some quick definitions, from of the Editors Association of Canada (EAC):

• Copyediting: Editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation and other mechanics of style; checking for consistency of mechanics and internal consistency of facts; marking head levels and approximate placement of art; notifying designer of any unusual production requirements. May include Canadianizing; metrication; providing or changing system of citations; writing or editing captions and/or credit lines; writing running heads; listing permissions needed and/or obtaining them; providing or editing prelims, back matter, cover copy and/or CIP data. May also include negotiating changes with author.
• Substantive Editing: Clarifying and/or reorganizing a manuscript for content and structure. Changes may be suggested to or drafted for the author. May include negotiating changes with author.

Now, that’s a fair amount of work, but there are a lot of other things that editors do knowing them will make it easier for you, the writer, when you go looking for an editor.

(Assuming you are a writer. Because if you’re not, why are you reading this?  Are you stalking me?  Are you analyzing me?  Are one of the alien monsters coming to take over this planet by entering the minds of its intelligentsia?!!!!)

(See what happens when you don’t use an editor?)

Here’s a list from the EAC of the different services editors can provide. I’m not going to give you the descriptions of each, because you can find them all right here.

• Developmental / Project Editing
• Substantive or Structural Editing
• Stylistic Editing
• Rewriting
• Copy Editing
• Picture Research
• Fact Checking / Reference Checking
• Indexing
• Mark-Up / Coding
• Proofreading
• Mock-Up (Rough Paste-Up)
• Production Editing

Now, obviously, not every job is in need of all of these skillsets.  But chances are you’re going to need at least some of those skills beyond copy and substantive

My next series is historical horror instead of fantasy. I need someone who can also do fact checking (did that major historical event really happen then?). Because it is aimed at a YA market, I also need someone who can do stylistic editing to make sure I’m writing at the corret reading level.

If you are a self-publishing something (which I may be doing in the near future…) you’re going to need more than that. Just looking at the list, I’m thinking someone who can do mark-up/coding, production editing, mock-up, proofreading…

It’s a lot, but by knowing what you need, you can budget for it and know what to look for in an editor.

But Can’t I Do It Myself?

Short stories? Yes. Novels? No, unless you want it to be bad. Self-published novel? Definitely not. Ever. Unless you want it to suck.

Every author edits their own work, but at for larger projects, you shouldn’t be the only one to do it, because you will miss something.

Case in point: One of my editors, Gabrielle Harbowy, is also a writer. Gabrielle is a professional. She knows her stuff. From her website:

“Gabrielle is an Affiliate member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). She edits for publishers including Pyr Books, and is a staff proofreader for Lambda Literary. In addition to her independent editing work, she is also Managing Editor at Dragon Moon Press, where she oversees the submissions and editing processes. She has edited for aspiring and first-time authors, New York Times Bestsellers, and Hugo Award winners. Books she has acquired and/or edited have gone on to be finalists and winners of Bram Stoker awards, Parsecs, and ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year awards.”

Now for the $24,000 question (and if you get the reference, congratulations! You’re old!): Does Gabrielle do all her own editing?

NO!

Like any good writer, Gabrielle does edit her own work – substantive and copy and everything else. But, before Gabrielle’s also sends her major works to another editor (either her publisher's editor, or an editor she knows for work that doesn't yet have a publisher). This is because Gabrielle knows that, like every other writer, she is too close to see everything that needs changing.

From those one or two copy-edits that you missed the first time and now can’t see for the life of you to that bit where the guy you killed in the first part of the book is giving a speech in the second, you need someone an outside eye. You NEED an editor.

So How Do I Find an Editor?

Word of mouth is your best best for finding a good editor. Talk to other writers (preferably successful ones) and see if they have an editor they use outside their publisher, and if so, do they take other clients.  Then go research that editor (because Google is here for a reason) and find out if they have the skillset that you need.

How much will it cost me?

Depends.

Yes, I know, I’m stunningly unhelpful sometimes.

Different editors charge different fees depending on their skillset, experience, and the level of work that’s involved in making your manuscript go from great (which I am sure it is now) to the THAT’S AMAZING!!!

And you want to be amazing, don’t you?


Next Week: Staying Healthy, Because Working Sick Sucks.

This Writing Life 8: Editing and Editors or Just Because It’s Done Doesn’t Mean It’s Done

(Note from Erik: My blog posts have been too long. Since I’m talking about editing this week, it seems like a good time to start shortening them)

Last week I talked about writers as Explorers or Engineers. I said that no matter which a writer was, when that writer finished their book, they were confident that what they have written was the best it could be. I also said they were wrong. Here’s why:

First drafts are never the best they can be.  Ever.

Some people say first drafts are always terrible. They are wrong. Some first drafts are terrible, some are OK, some are good, and some are great. All of them can still be improved.

And here’s the big secret: You can’t make your book the best it can be all by yourself.

You can improve it. You can fix typos and grammar and spelling. You can fix characters, change plot, remove inconsistencies, and correct timelines. But you still need set of outside eyes to look at it.

Too Close To Notice

When we write a novel, we are too close to see all the flaws. Maybe because it’s all in our heads, and therefore we see things on the paper that aren’t there. Or maybe we’ve looked at the work so many times we’ve stopped really seeing it.

Here’s some of my favourite mistakes:
• Saying the same thing over again.
• “You know how Sir Robert says [X] on page 243?” “Yes?” “He died on page 31.”
• Writing the same word different ways, like Mill pond, Mill-pond and Millpond.
• Saying the same thing over again.

And one that I didn’t do, but which is my personal favourite:

“Remember how you said, “Make every person count”?”
 “Yes?”
“You left out the “O”.”

 (Yes, it really happened)

When to Hire a Professional Editor

If your book has a publisher already (congratulations!) your publisher will supply you with an editor.  Otherwise, you should hire an editor when:

• You’re getting ready to send it to an agent
• You’re getting ready to send it to a publisher
• When you are self-publishing (please, please, please!)
• When you are stuck – you know the book could be better, but can’t figure out how, and neither can your first or beta readers. 

An Important Note

If your novel has been accepted for publication, the publisher should bring in an editor to work with you. If they do not, run screaming. Seriously.

If your publisher does not bring in an editor, it does not mean you are a perfect writer. It means that that publisher publishes unedited manuscripts, i.e.: crap.

What Stage in the Writing Process?

Everyone has his or her own process, so the answer is, “it depends.”

The amazing Tanya Huff, for example, is able to edit as she writes. By the time her first draft is done, it’s ready for her publisher to give it to their editors.

My books don’t go out to my publisher/editor until the fourth draft. Here’s the breakdown:

• First draft: Yay! I’ve written it! Pour the whiskey! NO ONE SEES THE FIRST DRAFT!
• Second draft: Fixes the messes I made and puts in all the things I left out of the first. This goes to my first reader (thanks, Katrina!)
• Third draft: fixes the things I missed on the second draft and those that my first reader says are inconsistent/stupid/don’t work (this involves lots of fun arguing). This goes to my beta readers.
• Fourth draft: Add in input from my beta readers, do another scan for typos, etc., and fixed anything that still bugs me. Off to my publisher/editor.

Next Week: More Editing and Editors, or More Than Just Copy vs Substantive

Alternate Timelines: Things not to do

Came across this article on io9:

10 Worst Mistakes that Authors of Alternate History Make

An interesting read, and some good tips to work on if you might be thinking of working on a novel that plays with history.

...not that I know anyone planning to do that.

...Really.

Oh, and they added this one this evening:

Another Mistake That Alternate History Authors Fall Into

Enjoy.

As for me, I'm editing (still). It's like writing only less fun.

But it makes the work so, so much better.

Sunday Night: the Last Con*cept Blog Post (for now)

Well, that was a pretty good end to a pretty good weekend.

Spent most of the day in the dealer's room, selling books and getting one more chance to talk to people before they headed on their way. Sold a lot of copies of Small Magics and a fair number of Cold Magics. Had several people who'd bought Small Magics on Saturday come back for Cold Magics on Sunday, just based on their reading Saturday night. That was a very nice feeling indeed.

My panel today was "Killing Your Babies," which was all about editing and the joys of realizing that that amazingly cool scene/character/description/idea/philosophy that you just know was the perfect thing when you wrote it is the thing you need to cut from the book. And if ever there was a group of people qualified to talk about it, it was my fellow panelists. From closest to furthest from me (I was sitting on the end of the table and moderating! I was moderating this group! cool!), there was Tad Williams, Marie Bilodeau, Violette Milan, and Deborah Beale!

It was a wide-ranging discussion with lots of great audience participation and lots of great stories from the writers at the table. In the course of talking about editing, we shared some of our favourite/most horrifying story realizations, discussed the "Disneyfication" of popular culture and the many times all of us have either written or read something which we know needed to be cut out.

Great fun, and an excellent panel to end on.

Then, to make things even cooler, I got an interview with Angela Roberts from The Gloaming. She asked some great questions, and I hope I wasn't talking too much in my answers. Thanks, Angela!

And speaking of thank you's, my thanks to everyone at Con*cept for having me as a panelist and treating all of us so well. And my deep, deep thanks to Marie Bilodeau, my partner in crime and at the Dragon Moon Press table for the weekend, who kept us both laughing through the weekend, translated for those whose who spoke mostly French but still wanted to know what my book was about, and for finding us great breakfast spots two days running.

To everyone new I met, and to everyone I got to see once again, merci beaucoup, et au revoir until next time!

A Little Christmas Music

I think I have a new favourite Christmas song.

The singer is Tim Minchin, an Australian musician, actor, comedian and writer. And apparently, if you download the song from iTunes in December, half of the proceeds go to autism research.

Tip of the hat to Neil Gaiman, who posted this on his journal first.

And now, since it's 10:30 p.m., it's time for more editing.

Editing and Brain Rules

Charging madly forward. Reached page 267 tonight, removed another 1500 words or so, and am almost pleased with the progress.

So is Gabrielle, who has been giving me gems from the Dragon Moon Press December slushpile. Impressive stuff. Not in a good way.

At work we are putting together some videos and part of my research on it took me to the Brain Rules website. It's a fascinating website, built around the book by the same title, written by John Medina. I haven't had time to dig too deeply into it, but it looks like the man has done his research, and the website itself is a great example of marketing design. There's a lot of neat stuff that I intend to explore sometime when it isn't midnight.

Correction. After midnight. I'm going to get myself four hours sleep and see if I can manage a workout in the morning (or should I say, later this morning?). It's unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

The Last Edit - Night 1

Did 46 pages tonight. Not bad for a start back, but much more to do.

Here's the thing: My editor needs it back by Christmas so we can get copy set and ready to go for the first round or reviews. The book is still 10,000 words more than what it should be, and while Gabrielle and I have worked out what needs to be done, it still needs to be done before the end of the month.

No problem.

Really.

Tomorrow, the goal is 80 pages. Let's see how it goes.

Taking a Night Off!!!

Why, you ask?

Because last night my editor, the indomitable Gabrielle Harbowy, and I finished going through her notes for Cold Magics. They were good notes and we resolved them all, or marked where I have to fix things during my next task:

One more edit before Dec. 25.

That's right, I have to go through the entire book by Christmas if we want to get advanced copies to the reviewers. And I still need to take out 10,000 more words. Oy veh!

But tonight, I am taking a break. I am chilling out, relaxing, and generally doing nothing except getting to bed on time. My only regret is I don't have a nice bottle of red wine to do it with.

So have a good night. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow (and every day for the next 14) we edit!

They've Done It...

Two in two days.

My editor Gabrielle Harbowy and my dear friend and reader Kim both finished going through Cold Magics. Excellent work in record time. Both are extremely insightful and each brings a different and extremely knowledgeably viewpoint to the editing process.

My thanks to both.

As soon as Gabrielle gets Cold Magics back to me, I'll be back at it. So far, we are running on time for our deadlines. Excellent!

Time to Start Working on Publicity

Yep. Cold Magics is in the hand of the mighty talented Gabrielle Harbowy, who is editor in charge at Dragon Moon Press (excuse the mess; they're building a new website). We're looking for a short turn-around time on this one, and that means getting together the publicity plan.

Now, for those who don't know, there is are differences between publicity and marketing.

Marketing gets you a guaranteed audience through traditional advertising, pay-per-clicks, paid interviews, infomercials, etc. It costs money and studies have shown that, for book sales, it isn't that effective, unless you have massive reach and say... a movie deal.

Publicity is cheaper, but does not have a guaranteed audience. Instead, have to build an audience by persuading them that what you have to sell -- in this case, Cold Magics -- is worth talking about. If you can do that, proper publicity can lead to interviews, articles, book reviews, word-of-mouth and from them to sales.

Interestingly enough, good publicity can far outweigh good marketing as a tool for getting audience (people listening to your message) and sales. Especially now in the days of social media.

So, step one is building a publicity plan. We're looking at a six month plan at this point, to promote and get interest before launch (launch date will be announced soon). There will also need to be a post-launch plan to keep attention on the book over the summer, through the convention and book fairs, and then into the fall season, when it's a great time to convince people they want to be buying my books as presents to give to others.

And I cannot tell you how cool it is to be able to say "my books."

So, this weekend is about getting the plan together (plus cleaning and laundry and all that fun stuff). I've been doing research for a fair while, have the concept going and the lists I need to get made, and from there it's a matter of putting the pieces together.

I'll put up more details about the plan going forward because I did say this blog would be about book marketing, and I haven't done much of that lately.

So, off to get groceries, then work on the plan.

And because I haven't mentioned it lately, now is an excellent time to read Small Magics, so you'll be ready when Cold Magics comes out.

Gabrielle Says Smart Things About Queries and Submissions

Gabrielle Harbowy is the highly talented and highly intelligent Editor-in-Charge over at Dragon Moon Press. On Monday she sent me a link to a great podcast interview she did about queries, submissions, and pitches on the Irreverent Muse.

Here is the interview.

Gabrielle knows that of which she speaks. For those aspiring writers out there, I suggest taking a listen and taking what she says to heart. Because nothing makes your submission end up in the garbage faster than not following the submission guidelines.

And to add to the coolness, she plugs Small Magics! And she likes my elevator pitch!

Done

I finished the edit of Cold Magics last night. I just sent it off to my publisher, Dragon Moon Press.

The ending was stunningly anti-climactic. I finally made the last changes, ran the spell-check one last time, hit save and I'm done!

And it's 11 p.m. on a Monday night and everyone is asleep and I had to be up in a few hours for work.

So this weekend, I will celebrate. Last night, I had a quiet glass of Glenfiddich, sat at the table and wondered what I was going to do with myself tonight.

Apparently, the answer is blogging and laundry.

And by the way:

I'm done! Squeeeee!

Neat Little Website

At work, I'm part of the team designing and building the new website. One of the things we need to do is ensure our website is accessible for those who are colour-blind, which led me to searching the internet for a tool to check it, which led me to snook.ca.

Snook.ca is the website of web designer and developer Jonathan Snook. It's nice little website with some interesting information, including his Colour Contrast Check. This handy tool allows you to put in any two colours (a foreground and a background) and see how well they fare in meeting standards for web accessibility. Alas, the piece I was working on didn't fare well at all, so it's back to the boards for me. Argh.

A great, very handy little tool.

And now, I'm going to... wait for it...

All right, it's editing Cold Magics.

Anyone surprised?

A Little Night Music

Friday night and I have nothing to say.

So how about some music?

This is a Soundie featuring Matthew Barber, produced by Athens Soundies

For those reading this on facebook (and there are some...), here is the link to the video.

And what is a soundie, you might ask? In this case it is the pet name for a single-take, live music video. For the history of the name, have a look at the Athens Soundies website.

Also, check out some of the bands. They've got some good stuff out there.

Tonight I am editing Cold Magics again. Then I'm to sleep well before midnight if I have to use a bottle of scotch and a meat tenderizing hammer to get there.

(exact method of using these two devices left as an exercise for the reader)

Killing Your Creations... Again

So I've got a scene in Cold Magics. I really like it. It has great emotion, depth, pathos, all sorts of fun things. Unfortunately, it does nothing to advance the plot.

I've tried modifying it, I've tried shortening it, tried changing it, but none of that works. It's either the original scene, or nothing. And the original scene doesn't add anything to the book. All I can do is kill it.

Sigh.

On the bright side, it should knock 10 pages off the book.

Sigh.

I had the exact same issue (different scene) when I was writing Small Magics. Sometimes there's good bits that just don't fit the book you're writing. And even if they're really, really good bits, there's still no point in keeping them in the book.

So I have a file on the computer where I keep the scenes I can't use. After all, I might be able to use them somewhere else, right?

All right, I'll never use them, but I still keep them. Anyone out there want to tell me I'm not alone in this?

100 Pages In!

Actually 107, but it sounds more dramatic this way.

I've had to change my schedule, decrease my workouts, increase my sleep and decrease my writing time, but the net result is better progress. I reached 107 pages last night in the Cold Magics edit.

It's been interesting analyzing how I write when doing my first draft (which is part planning and mostly stream of consciousness). Things get said two or three times that onlly need to be said once. Other things aren't said at all because I think I've written them when in fact I've only thought them. Oops.

I am also proud to report that I've managed to knock off 35 pages from the draft. This means I only have another 165 pages to cut. No problem, really.

Oy.

God, I Hate Technology

Okay, I don't really, but tonight I've got something of a passionate hatred for it since it's taken me two hours and two calls to the service centre to get the wireless network hooked up to my computer.

Everything is set and working and now we have a home wireless network, but oy veh!

I'd like to thank the D-LINK support service people who were unfailingly polite and helped me run through this whole mess. It's a massive pain, but they sorted the mess.

And now, editing, though it's going to be token because I am already tired.

And the edit continues...

And I am back at the beginning. Again.

This edit is becoming something of a frustrating process for me. I spent a week editing the prologue, which was too long and, when I finished editing it, was still too long.

That's when I realized it was also unecessary. Completely. A waste of paper.

So I've cut it.

And now I am editing the new begining for the book, and am hoping to make some better speed, though so far it hasn't been happening. We shall see, though.

Back to it.

And They're Off!

I began the edit of Cold Magics this week. I've run into a slight snag in that I'm sick as a dog right now, but plan to be going again very soon. Will attempt some tonight, but not much. I'm for bed in half an hour.

Cold Magics - The Rewrites Continue

So after a day or two of sulking I've managed to go back and get some work done. Gotten to page 261, which is not as far as I'd like, but considering half of it is fresh material, notbad.

Time for bed. Tomorrow, more writing.