self-editing

True that I'm a fantasy writer, but the title of the post first came out as "elf-editing". No, I don't have elves editing my manuscripts, unfortunately. ;-)


Anyhow, as I'm still working on the manuscript of BoI – Fire that I plan to upload this weekend on Smashwords and Kindle, I thought I'd share some updates on the whole thing. First of all: the printed version. Considering how expensive the "European" version is, from now on, I'll have only "US editions" in digest format. Easier for me and easier for everybody. Cheaper for Americans, and probably for the rest of the world as well. We'll see when I order my copy to check it.


Second: I changed editor for this one, but I have to keep my style consistent, so even if she deleted all the "s" at the end of "towards", I'll have to leave them in – consistency, they're there in Air, they'll be there in Fire. Same with other words with multiple spellings. My spellchecker underlined "toward" written without "s", so I write it with an "s" when I use American spelling and without when I use the British spelling (i.e. in the historical novel – on the back burner again until I put Fire out there, haha). So busy self-editing for consistency of style (and cutting the boring parts, that bored me anyway, haha).


Third: I'm advised to put a characters chart on this one because it's quite complicated (did I mention I love huge casts? ;-) ). I don't know how I could put some kind of link (bookmark?) in the e-book so the reader can click and get to the characters chart… with the printed version it's easy to flip to the end of the book, but with an e-book? Advices?


When I ordered my printed copy of Air, I read it through and through and found a couple of formatting mistakes, like a paragraph with no right alignment (which might be the rule for manuscripts, but looks really ugly in a book) and a chapter not starting on the next page + some missing " at the end of dialog lines. Easily fixed and re-uploaded (but the signed copy will be the "imperfect" one, sigh).


Then I took it again to find an example for a guest post (I'm still awed I got a request from THEM and won't say who they are until my post is live there, which will be real soon) and while skimming I saw a couple of missing dots (or full stops, like I was taught to call them, having started learning English in England). Uh-oh. And the novel has been copy-edited and re-read before uploading. Sigh.


So from now on, I decided one pass of edits will simply be skimming through, checking punctuation (and capital letters when needed), especially around dialog. And formatting of new scenes and new chapters.


I know typos can come out months and years later (which happened to all my manuscripts, except now they're published, sigh!) and I will put a special care on punctuation. I hate books with typos because English is not my mother tongue and I have to stop and wonder if it's a new word or a typo, so I really want mine to be as good as humanly possible. Reading backwards doesn't work if the word is spelled correctly but is the wrong one.


So what to do to get those little buggers? Even pros miss them. Any tips you could share (the skimming sounds like a good idea, but I still have to try it – and it's only for punctuation anyway)?



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Published on June 09, 2011 00:00
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