Publishing Help

First Things First: Editing and Revising

Okay, I'm assuming here that you've already written a book. Even if it's just a first draft.

I'm going to start with the editing/revising stage because this is where I begin to also format the book for Kindle. If the book is long enough to publish as a paperback I format for that too, but later. The Kindle version comes first.

Keep in mind, that most of my books are short. Lately, I've been gravitating toward the quick read, books in the 10k word range. I've done enough of them that I don't have to do a lot of rewriting.

First round of edits

I usually write books in a series and I write them back to back...I don't take time to read over them or edit them...not until I've finished the first draft of the very last book do I go back and read over the first book. I do this to distance myself from that first book. If you're too close to your work, you will easily overlook a lot of errors and bad writing.

My first round of edits involves me reading the manuscript and making notes on future rewrites. I also highlight words that I use too often in a short amount of time. I recommend editing in Google Docs because you can easily make notes about specific areas of text. I usually write with Scrivener and then edit with Google Docs.

As I make my first pass through the book, I add page breaks between chapters, and I highlight the chapter headings of each chapter and change them to "heading 1" under styles. Then I center each chapter heading. The only other bit of formatting I do during this time is I go through and find any scene breaks in the book. While writing the book, I usually use "~+~+~+~+~+~+~" to denote a scene change, but this isn't the most professional-looking, so I use "insert" then "symbol" and search for a symbol that looks better. If my book is a romance, I like to use three or four hearts, but there are also diamonds, circles, various symbols that can be used.

Continue reading through your manuscript, making notes and highlighting things you'd like to change later. If you spot small errors, go ahead and fix them now. I recommend using Grammarly, or a similar program. I am lousy with comma usage, so Grammarly helps me with that quite a lot.

Second round of edits

This time, pay attention to all of your notes and highlights. Go through them one by one and address each issue.

Go ahead and make a title page, including the title of your book, subtitle, if applicable and the author name. Highlight the book title and under the "styles" area click on Title. This will enlarge the text. Center it as well. Next, highlight your subtitle and click on "subtitle" under "styles." Center it. Finally, highlight the author's name and choose a heading besides heading 1. Or, you can leave it as-is. Make sure to center this as well. Add a page break at the end of this page.

You should make a copyright notice next. This should include something like this:

Copyright 2020 by Jennifer White. All Rights Reserved.

You can also add the copyright symbol under "insert" "symbol." You can search google for other copyright notices if you prefer. You might want to add something about distributing your work, or that your book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people, places, or events is purely coincidental. I also like to add things like who designed my cover. We will add one more important piece of information to this page once it's time to create the paperback, but for the Kindle, no more is needed.

Third round of edits

I usually only do three rounds of edits for my work, which may sound absurd to some, but keep in mind that my books are very short and I write pretty clean. By now, your highlights should be all taken care of. Now, read over your manuscript again. Pay attention to comma placement, misspelled words, proper grammar (except in dialogue), paragraph indents. Make sure your entire manuscript uses the same size font (12 is standard). Use a font that is easy to read. Take your time with this round.

Add any back matter that you want to add. Things like an author's note, about the author section, the first chapter of the next book in the series, any of that stuff. Make sure to put page breaks between each new section.

Do not add page numbers to your manuscript. Do not add a table of contents. There are no page numbers with Kindle books, and the table of contents comes later.

Once you get to the end of your manuscript, it helps if you can find a beta reader that will read your book and give you their honest opinion. Be warned, though, that you really have to be specific with your betas and tell them exactly what you want. I haven't had good luck with them so I take my chances without one. If you can afford an editor, go for it! If not, do everything you can to produce an error-free book.

There are a few formatting items that you can't do with Google Docs. So, now is a great time to download Kindle Create. This software is free and makes the rest of the formatting stuff a breeze. It does NOT work on Chromebooks unfortunately. I have formatted books without Kindle Create, so I know how...I'm just a little rusty and don't know if I remember everything. If you aren't able to get Kindle Create, let me know and I'll try to relearn formatting without it and I'll write a post about it.

That's the end of our first lesson. PLEASE feel free to comment with any questions!!




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