I'm very pleased to have Georgia Carter Mathers on Fantasy Fun Reads today. She has some great tips for Indie authors, tips I wish I had read when I first started publishing.
Guest Post:
Editing in the wild
wild west of indie book production
The life of an indie
writer is like weathering a dust storm in an old western. We must
produce quality books quickly or die a death that results from our
readers forgetting about us. We don’t have the benefit of a big
publishing team or a big budget. When the dust storm arrives, we’re
tough enough to ride it out, release another book, and still find
time to socialize on Facebook and woo that blogger.
While a trade-off in
book production results when speed is favored over quality, indie
writers can still produce books with minimal errors to a strict time
schedule, sometimes in as little as three months, by implementing
some or all of these suggestions:
Assess your
goals
If
you’re writing as a hobby and hoping to make a little bit of money
on the side, you may only want to take up some of these suggestions.
Consider all of these suggestions if you’re writing as a
professional writer and you want to make a lot of money.
Be proactive;
learn your grammar and your style guide.
This
is one of the most important suggestions I can make to you. It is
based on the way that journalists work. Because sub-editors are being
phased out or outsourced, journalists are now required to produce
high volumes of work, accurately and quickly, and they must produce
material that is grammatically correct every single time. An indie
writer is no different. Getting it right the first time is in your
best interests.
If
you know you have a problem with grammar, do something about it. Buy
a book of exercises that teaches basic sentence construction. Work
through it slowly. Learn to recognize basic errors, and it will save
you time and money in book production. At the very least, learn from
websites like the Purdue
Online Writing Lab.
Get
a copy of your style guide and use it as a reference until you start
feeling comfortable with the conventions. If you’re writing for the
US audience, you might want to use The
Chicago Manual of Style.
Develop an army
of beta-readers, but don’t treat them like editors.
Rather
than give your manuscript to one or two friends, give it to upward of
six people in your network. Select those who like the genre you’re
writing in and give it to those who can provide feedback on the
issues you’re writing about. When they have finished reading your
manuscript, ask them whether they enjoyed it and what they thought
could be improved.
If
you’re writing a character from another culture, get a sensitivity
reader. Be prepared to hear that you’ve written a stereotype that
makes them angry. This means that you need to be prepared to either
dump or significantly rework your characterization. Be prepared to
repeat this process until the sensitivity reader is happy.
Use
your beta-readers to make decisions about how much work your
manuscript realistically needs and whether it is worth spending money
to publish this manuscript.
Some
beta-readers will correct your grammar, and that is great. If they
are correct, by all means, thank them, take their advice, and make
the changes. But they will not be able to correct grammar reliably;
they don’t have the skill required. If the indie has used a
beta-reader instead of an editor, the indie will eventually receive
feedback that an unacceptable amount of mistakes have been missed.
Often there is no time for another round of editing. The indie writer
is already in the middle of producing another book, and they will
have to wear the embarrassment.
Develop an
editing schedule that includes all the editing phases and stick to
this schedule
The
kinds of editing that occur in each phase can differ between editors,
so it is best to ask what the editor will do before you hire them.
Incorporate the scope of the work to be done into the editing
contract.
Make
sure your editing includes structural and developmental editing,
copyediting or line editing, and proofreading after your manuscript
has been put into the book template. Don’t skip any of these steps.
You will be sorry if you do.
Lay
out your editorial schedule and keep to it as though it is your
bible. The structural and developmental edit might come back with
editorial suggestions that will take a long time to fix, but wherever
possible, keep to your schedule.
Develop an
editing team you know you can rely on.
So,
this all seems like a long and drawn out process. It doesn’t have
to be. When you’ve done it once, you will learn what works for you
and what doesn’t. Basically, you will develop a set of procedures
or steps that you know will need to be completed to produce a quality
book. You will get quicker the more books you produce. You will learn
who supported you and who didn’t. You will also learn which team
member is worth the money you paid them. All this increases your
efficiency in producing quality books.
When you follow
these steps, and you’re announcing over social media that you’re
releasing another book, your readers will come back for more. The
behind-the-scenes-stuff that often feels like an almighty dust storm
has not influenced the quality of your latest book. When readers buy
it, they will have nothing to do but enjoy the book, knowing you
produced it with love and skill. They’ll also know another book
will be coming from you very soon.
Georgia Carter
Mathers is an Australian writer and freelance editor. She holds a
Bachelor of Arts, an Associate Degree in Creative Writing, and is
currently halfway through a Graduate Certificate in Publishing at The
University of Sydney. Her latest book, Trelloran Seduction, is a
dystopian romance. She is currently writing the second book in the
series, The Miana Prophecy. You can find Georgia at her website
https://darklovestories.com
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Trelloran Seduction is available for pre-order!
