Caught Transformers 3 with some friends last weekend. Eesh, I actually disliked this movie even more than the second one. But I didn’t expect much other than big robots fighting other big robots, Shia LaBeouf playing Shia LaBeouf and that new girl Rosie Huntington-Whiteley would be objectified in a fashion befitting a Michael Bay movie.
Also, True Blood Season 4 is moving along well. I have only read the first of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but I’m really glad that the show is seriously diverging from them. I’m reading the ‘A Game of Thrones’ which was the basis of Game of Thrones Season 1, and other than a few areas the novel is very parallel to the show. Its nice to not be reading an exact copy of the book on screen, otherwise why bother??
Since I’ve found a professional manuscript editor for my second Star Brigade novel, I’m in the mood to discuss what worked for me in the editing arena. This is extremely important, especially when it comes to self-publishing. For my last book, I had around three editors review my novel. One was a legit manuscript editor/old college acquaintance, the second was a friend and fellow writer whose opinion I trusted. The third was a copy editor.
I plan to follow the same pattern for this next book. When it comes to editors, there should be at least 2 but no more than 5. Too many opinions can dilute your work when its over 5.
With 2 editors, having a friend read my manuscript (more specifically, a reliable one who can be objective) is important. That right off the bat gives me someone other than myself who’ll read my book and tell me straight up whether it sucks or not and what works best.
After that, I always want a professional/semi-professional editor to give my work a more detailed critique. Some of the bad writing and weak structural patterns my editor found in my last book were actually pretty hilarious. Not to mention, there were areas of my book where having someone really grill me on why I wrote something a certain way really forced me to defend it or find other ways to get the point of that story across.
Now my magic number for editors is always three. Why? Because I feel that after a friend and professional editor put a book through a few rounds of critiquing, there will be what I call a ‘typo’ trail. No matter how careful we are, our edits will leave all manner of dumb typos. And even an amazing book can be felled by this.
On my very first book review, after I thanked the reviewer for their 4 out of 5 star stamp, they said the one reason my novel didn’t get 5 stars was because of all the typos. Kinda embarrassing. So I hired a copy editor whose sole purpose was to catch as many typos and grammar issues as possible. This is usually something to worry about right before a manuscript is ready to be published.
My first editor will start mid-July. Will give updates as the process moves forward. Till next time!
[…] most professional editing from someone who isn’t doing it for a living. I’ve spoken in a past blog entry about how many editors I usually have review my […]