Amateur To Published: The Fiction Writer's Guide To Publishing

1 - Pre-Editing Tasks

Before you can begin editing your manuscript, there are certain tasks that you need to accomplish first to make the process much easier. These are:

STEP 1: SAVE A COPY OF YOUR ORIGINAL FIRST DRAFT

You never know what could happen to your manuscript so take every measure to preserve this version. First things first – email it to yourself. Second – save it on an external hard-drive or a flash drive. Top it all off by saving it in the cloud i.e. either on Dropbox or Google Drive. If anything happens to your manuscript while you're editing then you have backup copies to look at. The original is also useful because some important things may end up edited out. If you have those excerpts, you can reintroduce them to your manuscript.

Also, in case someone ever steals your work (which probably won't happen), you have your first draft as proof that this was always your work. The timestamp for the creation of the document will also serve as proof.

STEP 2: PUT IT ASIDE

As eager as you are to get into your editing, you need to take a step back after the first draft is completed. Why? Editing needs fresh eyes. You've been writing this story for the last month(s). Let's be honest; you're just glad it's over because you were already fed up with it! If you start editing right now, you won't do your best work because you're just eager to get it out of your sight.

Put your first draft away from a few days, weeks or months. Use that time to start a new project or even better take a holiday to celebrate your first complete book. By the time you come back to it, the story will seem like an entirely new story that you can look at with critical and emotionless eyes.

STEP 3: READ THROUGH

Before you start editing your work, read through what you wrote. Some writers like to print it out, but if you're short on paper or looking for a less wasteful way to read through, consider converting your manuscript into a MOBI, epub or pdf file that you can read at leisure on your phone, tablet or PC.

The point of this read through is for you to refamiliarize yourself with the story, consume it as a normal reader would, then pick out the large-scale problems that immediately jump at you. Such problems could include disappearing characters, irrational actions by the characters, discrepancies in issues of setting, physical attributes etc. Note those things that jump out at you immediately and prepare to deal with them in the next chapters.

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