This weekend at the conference I talked about indie publishing, which was ironic since I now have a novel being published by The Wild Rose Press. At the conference, I discussed the steps to take to self publish on Kindle. Write the book, then hire an editor to proofread it. Since I’ve been an English teacher for 20 years, I can edit myself, but most writers will need an editor.
My editor, Tori Spence, is awesome. Even with my experience, she found some things for me to fix. They were not puncuation or grammar mistakes, but more fiction-writer mistakes. I did a “find” search for these words: wondered, thought, touched, knew, and felt. Tori says it’s okay to use knew and felt sometimes, but look at the sentence and if you can say it another way, do so. The reasoning is that these words put the reader one step removed from the action of the story. Thought can be put in italics as an internal dialogue. I used that tip most of the time.
The other words I just had to go through and see how I could change up the sentence to make the verb more active. Sometimes I decided to delete the sentence completely. It took a week for me to go through these revisions and a few plot problems before I sent the ms. back to Tori.
Friday she sent me what she calls “the final pass before pre-galley.” I took a look at her edits and this time they were just a few simple word choice and plot things. It shouldn’t take me long. If I’d been free this weekend, they’d be done. But the weekend was crazy fun and busy and then I had things on the calendar today, tomorrow and Thursday.
I will get it done. So glad I planned ahead and took some time off the day job. I don’t know how I’d fit everything in otherwise.
Cynthia Harrison 