Editing Made Easy
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About this ebook
Writing a book is difficult. Everyone knows that. But editing it properly may be even more difficult. Don't try to do it yourself. You'll be sorry if you do. But there are a lot of things you can do to prepare your book for the editors and get it in the best shape possible.
In this book, you'll learn to look for crutch words, unnecessary words, redundancies, improper sayings, and you'll learn many of the tougher rules on comma usage. We also touch on dialogue tags, capitalization in dialogue, and writing using all five senses.
If you practice the examples used in this book, you will improve some portion of your writing. I guarantee it.
Giacomo Giammatteo
Giacomo Giammatteo lives in Texas, where he and his wife run an animal sanctuary and take care of 41 loving rescues. By day, he works as a headhunter in the medical device industry, and at night, he writes.
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Editing Made Easy - Giacomo Giammatteo
Introduction
Editors Are Important
I don’t make that statement lightly. I truly believe it. Years ago I did a blog post about copy editors. I included it in my No Mistakes Writing and No Mistakes Publishing books because I think it’s that important. I’ve also included it in this book because I think that copy editing is not just necessary but imperative.
For those of you who don’t think editing is important, look at the comment below. It’s a review of a romance book from a customer at Amazon.
Comment from a customer on Amazon
Had this book been properly edited I would have given it five stars. The story is a good one. The characters are lovable. The villains are pretty scary. The misspellings and over- and unnecessary use of commas make the story difficult to read.
Amazon customer
So here we have a person (a rare one) who is willing to write a review, and this author has forced them to write a negative one, when according to that person, the book would have been given five stars had it been edited properly.
The sad thing is that this type of comment is not uncommon. I’ve seen far too many reviews like this.
Editing Process
It’s one thing to talk about editing and quite another to do it the right way. Many authors think editing is simply a matter of finishing the book, then handing it off to an editor and publishing it when the editing is done.
After writing more than thirty books, I can safely say it takes longer to do the editing than it does the writing. If you’re wondering how that can be, take a look at the process I go through with each book:
• Write the book
• Read it and make edits of things I notice
• Give it to beta readers (primarily for content review)
• Make the changes suggested by beta readers
• Send it to editors
• Make the changes suggested by editors
• Give to a proofreader or two (I recommend a professional proofreader, not a friend.)
• Make changes
• Give it to readers for prelaunch reads
• Make any final changes
• Publish
All of this sounds like a lot of work, and it is. At times I struggle to find competent beta readers, especially those willing to read some of my nonfiction books, like the ones I’ve written about grammar. I can usually get enough beta readers for my mystery and fantasy books—I had twelve beta readers for my last mystery. But that’s difficult. It has taken me several years to work up to that many good beta readers. When I first started out, I had a difficult time getting two.
The real kicker is that, every step of the way, I read the book again, and each time I do, I’m sure it’s error free—until it goes through the next step and someone finds more mistakes or more things to be fixed or worded differently.
And therein lies the problem. Many don’t consider wordiness or redundancies a problem. I know I didn’t when I first started. In fact, I’m sure that if I read my first few books again, I’d be mortified. Now I consider redundancies and wordiness to be as much a problem as a spelling error or a grammatical mistake. We’ll cover both of those issues in later chapters.
Part I
Editing
As mentioned, I consider editing to be an integral part of writing a good book.
You can’t write a good book without a good editor. And you definitely can’t be your own editor.
Some of the chapters in this section deal with what a good editor can do for you, while others deal with how you can help your editor by getting your manuscript in the best shape possible before submitting it to them.
In the next chapters, I’m going to show you a few examples of what I’ve done wrong, as well as a few simple things you can do to greatly improve your work.
Editing
This book deals with editing. Why? Because it’s needed. A lot of what makes a book good is how well it’s been edited. When I speak of editing, I’m referring to copy editing, not content editing. Content editing has its place, but I prefer to rely on beta readers for that. Copy editing I would only trust to a good—make that damn good— editor .
I believe that, ultimately, an author bears the responsibility of good editing. Of course, they are financially responsible, but they should also do their best to have their work as close to publishable as possible before submitting it to an editor.
This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is your editor’s sanity. Let’s go back a sentence. I said, as close to publishable.
By that I mean as close to error free as you can get it. I never want to read a book and be interrupted by mistakes. I’m sure you don’t either.
How do you get to error free
status?
Invariably, mistakes will slip in to your final copy. Sometimes not, but sometimes they will. I’ve seen mistakes in books published by the Big Five publishers, so it’s bound to happen to the rest of us, right?
It’s true. If you publish enough books, no matter how hard you try, mistakes will occur. But there are things you can do to prevent this from happening.
Mistakes happen, most often when there are too many to fix. That’s easy to resolve. Produce the best manuscript you can; read it and fix any mistakes; give it to beta readers, who will point out more mistakes; fix the comments from beta readers; give it to your editor, who will fix mistakes; review it yourself (again); give it to a professional proofreader and ideally one or two amateur proofreaders; fix yet again; give it to your formatter, who may spot any errors that were missed; read it a final time, then publish. By this time it has gone through nine or ten reads and it should be as close to ready as possible.
That sounds like a lot of work, but your book is going to be out there forever. Make it right.
If you go through this kind of process each time you publish a book, your readers will love you for it. You will give them error-free or damn near error-free reading, and that is a nice feeling.
We all know that everyone needs an editor. Even editors need editors. With that knowledge in hand, why not make it as easy as possible by fixing as much as you can yourself?
There are a lot of reasons to do it. Notice I didn't say There's a lot of reasons. If I had used there's, the editor would have had to fix it. You can check out my book No Mistakes Grammar, Volume I if you need to know why.
Back to the reasons.
Reason Number One: Personal pride. It feels nice to receive your manuscript back from the editor with fewer markups. I'm not saying you'll be error-free overnight, but it's something to shoot for. After thirty-plus books, I still have far more markups than I want, but it is improving.
Reason Number Two: If you're an author, I'm guessing you have a blog or do some other writing—writing where you do not pay an editor to look your work over. If that's the case, try to get up to speed so that you make as few mistakes as possible. Again, I don't expect you to be perfect, but you can at least get the basics right. Everything you write is a reflection on you. If I haven’t read an author and one of their blogs has mistakes in it, do you think I’m going to rush out and buy their books? Not a chance.
Reason Number Three: Occasionally—and I do mean occasionally—you'll find an editor who will charge less if your work is good. This may not happen, but again, it's worth shooting for. What's the worst that could happen—your writing improves? That’s not so terrible.
I am by no means an editor, but I've picked up a few things along the way. I'll share them here. These alone will greatly improve your manuscript.
Words and Phrases to Search For
There are a lot of phrases that have made their way into our vocabulary that sound normal, but when analyzed, we can see the error of our ways. The next chapter deals with redundancies. There may be some repeats here from a few of my blogs, but some of these phrases are so ubiquitous in writing, especially novel writing, that I thought it worthwhile mentioning them.
Up and Down: as in:
stand/stood up
sit/sat down
lift up
Go through and take a look. If a character is sitting at the table or on a sofa and you say they stood up, wouldn't it be just as good to say They stood
? If you're already sitting down, where else would you stand but up?
The same goes for the other phrases. If you're standing and someone invites you to sit, they don't need to say Sit down.
Sit is fine by itself. Just like "lift up" is unnecessary. Lift that box for your mother
is the same as Lift up that box for your mother.
The same applies to climb up
and many other phrases. If you search for up and down, you'll be able to see where you can fix it up.
Or perhaps you could just fix it.
Some more to consider:
The sun was shining down on me.
He tracked him down.
Put it down on the table.
He fell down.
She knelt down.
Look up at the sky.
He plopped down on the couch.
He climbed up the ladder.
Now, look at these sentences without the word down or up.
The sun was shining on me.
He tracked him.
Put it