How to Edit Your Own Book, Part 1

​Today I’m going to be talking about how to edit your own book. Now, I am going to give you a step-by-step process, but before we get into that, I would like to go over what I will and will not be covering, along with a slight disclaimer.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​First of all, there are, generally speaking, approximately four levels of editing. There’s developmental editing, which generally takes place during the writing process and looks at the book as a whole and its structure. There’s substantive editing, which looks at the book’s structure and things like consistency and characterization within the book and scene-to-scene. There’s copy editing, also called line editing, which looks at the book on a sentence and paragraph level for structural flow, logic, argument, and repetition issues. And finally there is proofreading, which looks for typographical errors and style-guide errors.
 
I’m not going to be talking about developmental editing here, because that takes place during the writing process, but maybe I’ll discuss it in a later post on good writing practices. I’m also not going to be covering in extreme detail proofreading, although it will be part of it. The reason for this is that all books need to be professionally proofread by someone other than the author—which means that even professional proofreaders need to get someone else to proofread their books. There are two reasons for this: The first is that proofreading takes an extremely specific set of skills and knowledge. You have to be the sort of person who has an extremely precise eye for details, and you have to have encyclopedic knowledge of the particular style guide you’re using. If you write fiction, I do recommend using the Chicago Manual of Style, which is widely used and easy on the reader.
 
The second reason that you always need your book professionally proofread is an issue that I’m going to be discussing throughout because it’s a problem with all editing. And that’s simply that you’re so close to your book that a lot of times instead of seeing what is actually in your book, you see what you expect to see or what you would have written. So unless you’re a professional proofreader and it’s been 25 years since you wrote your book and you haven’t reread it since and you’ve completely forgotten it, and you’re a very different person, someone else needs to be the one proofreading your book—and preferably more than one proofreader if you can manage it.
 
So, today I will be going over how to substantive edit and copy edit your book. But before I get started, one brief disclaimer: Professional editors exist for a reason. They are very good at what they do, and they have done it a lot. I like to think about it like this: An un-proofread book is like grilling stew meat. No matter how good a chef or writer you are, stew meat just shouldn’t be grilled, man. It’s not good! If you follow the instructions and suggestions I’m going to give you on self-editing your book, it’s like grilling with sirloin. If you’re a good chef, you can make a really tasty meal with sirloin. But it’s never going to be as good as if you hire a very good professional, because that is like grilling with ribeye. The down side to ribeye is it’s going to cost you a pretty penny, whereas sirloin you can get pretty cheaply if you know where to look.
 
That being said, here are the things I do to make my own books better in preparation for being published:
 
STEP ONE – You have finished the rough draft of your book. How do you feel about it? If your answer is “it’s pretty good” or “it’s not good but I have no idea how to fix it,” then your next step is to get your book critiqued. Now, critiquing can be done by a professional; you can hire one to go over your book and tell you the good and the bad, but if there are people in your life who are—and this is important—discerning readers who read your genre and are people you trust, then you can use them to critique your book. I like to start off with three critiquers, and I try to get a variety of different people, not three people who are sort of similar and think in the same ways. I want to get people who look at the world from different angles but all of whom love fantasy, which is what I generally write. So, ask these three people to critique your book, and then give them a reasonable amount of time (usually two to three months) to read it and then type up their thoughts and get back to you. This also gives your brain a bit of a break, because—something I’ll be talking about throughout, already mentioned once—is that you want to be a little more distant from your book. You want to forget it a little bit, so that when you look at it again, your eyes are fresher.
 
So now, two or three months have passed. Your three critiques come in. The next thing you should do is, before you look at the critiques, especially if these are emails, send an email back saying “Thank you so much for your critique,” and then do not send them another email on the topic for at least two days, preferably a week. Because if you’re anything like me, once you look at the critique, your reaction will be like this: “But, but I thought it was perfect! I thought you were going to tell me it was the best ever! Why are you finding all these problems? You’re wrong! It is perfect!” And I’m a professional editor—you’d think I’d know better. But I don’t. This happens every single time. So, give yourself a week to think it over and say, “Okay, well, maybe they have a point after all.” And don’t do anything to your book yet. Make sure you have all three critiques in before you touch your book, and then give it more time. Wait. If you can wait a couple of months, maybe even six months, that would be ideal, but at least wait a couple of weeks. Let their ideas and their responses soak in. Oftentimes, good critiquers will give suggestions on how to fix a specific problem, and sometimes you can fix problems in really simple ways that don’t require massive changes. But regardless, make sure (remember, you know your book best) that you are changing your book in a way that makes sense, that answers the critiques, and that fits with your vision.
 
A note here before I go on: If you aren’t yet content with where your book is, but you do know where you want to take it, hold off on the critiques and do this next step first, and then do critiques afterward, and then repeat this next step.
 
STEP TWO – Completely rewrite your book. By “completely rewrite your book,” I don’t mean rewrite the problematic areas and then copy and paste the rest. I don’t mean edit it. I mean rewrite every single word. If you’re going to give in to temptation, print it off and rewrite it from that. If not, I often do a split screen—I’ll have my old document on the left and my new document on the right, and I’ll look at one and type in the other. Or if you have a time crunch, you can use a Word document on the left and something like Write or Die 3, which was a wonderful program, on the right. Retype the whole thing, and try to do it at a fairly good pace. You don’t want to very slowly rewrite it over the course of a year because you’ll begin to forget. 
 
One of the things you’re going to do while rewriting is check continuity. A lot of times when you’re writing, especially if you’ve been writing the same book for years, you simply forget bits that you wrote earlier, and so your continuity is a little off. Or you’re dropping hints for things that don’t happen, or you’re not dropping hints when you really should be. So continuity and consistent characters (we’re in the substantive editing here) are things you should fix.
 
But also keep in mind what sort of writer you are. Are you a florid writer or a sparse writer? Do you have certain other strengths or weaknesses? Because now is the time to compensate. I personally, like most editors, tend to be a fairly sparse writer, so when I rewrite, my rewrites end up significantly longer—sometimes as much as a third longer than the original, because I’m adding in a lot of description. On the other hand, a lot of non-editors are very florid writers and will go on wandering digressions in their story, things that need to be cut, descriptions that need to be cut in half. So be aware of what kind of writer you are.
 
I’m going to stop here for today; next time, we’ll discuss a second critique and reading your book aloud, so stay tuned.

Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about how to edit your own book? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

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Deborah J. Natelson

Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.