This week’s blast from the past is the first of my posts that actually racked up some views, and people still seem to stumble upon it from time to time. As I have officially embarked on the editing process for Sylvanus: Swords and Suns, I thought it fitting to look back on the editing struggle after going through it a half-dozen more times.
Much of this post still holds up. It is still too expensive for me to get my work professionally edited without going well into the red. The only thing I would mention is that after actually going through a professional editing process with Grendel Press for Koen and still finding things that slipped through once it was published, even with a professional, you won’t catch everything. That isn’t to say the editor I worked with wasn’t fantastic; she was, but we are all human. I’m sure I am not alone in saying I have found even basic typos in mass-published work.
Luckily, the tools available to authors now in the editing realm are much improved, and as I use them at work too, I can get them subsidized. They still don’t catch the subtle things (especially in fiction) and won’t help with developmental edits, but when it comes to copyediting, they’re getting pretty good.
I will say that I look back on the editing process for Koen with warmth. It was actually a lot of fun to have someone go through my work with such a fine-tooth comb and get what I was trying to say, so I will not go so far as to say professional editors aren’t worth it. They most certainly are, and if you can justify the expense, do so. But for now, I must settle again with my old process, tearing apart and rebuilding a book until I learn to hate it a little.
Cheers!
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The best comment on that original post was the writer who talked of using friends (including fellow writers) as beta readers. For fans of your work, this is a good exchange — a first look at a new work in exchange for keeping track of typos, dropped words, and occasionally some higher level stuff like continuity problems if they notice it. Readers (including those with zero professional proofreading experience) DO tend to notice typos, which is a curse AND potentially a blessing since that’s a pretty easy task for a Beta reader.
It IS maddeningly difficult to proofread your own work, in part because you know exactly what you meant to say so it is much easier to glide over a typo and also (because the text is so familiar) it’s hard to slow down enough to see typos. I have always been a good proofreader (even without training) because I am a very visual reader, so words that aren’t right jump out of me (I will pick up a menu and almost the first thing I see is a typo). However, to learn to be an excellent proofreader I had to learn to slow down — fast readers mostly don’t consume text word by word, they inhale phrases and sentences. And the last thing a writer eager to declare a work done and kind of sick of reading it wants to do is SLOW DOWN and take more time examining words.
I encourage other fans of SAT’s writing to volunteer as beta readers — there really is no experience necessary to be helpful, and it’s fun to get a first look at a new treasure!
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