Andromeda Rhoades Tranquility: The Local War (Book 3) Now at Step 2 of Editing
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I finally finished Step 1: Copy Edit 1. Took five weeks longer than I’d planned, but the story needed the extra work. It is now tighter, better, and incorporates many of the comments and suggestions my authors’ critique group provided. I can’t repeat enough how important having a critique group is to the process! So, I should finish Copy Edit 2 by year’s end, then Line edit 1 shortly after that.
Step 1: Copy Edit 1: This edit focuses on significant changes, additions, and deletions. When I write a first draft, I immerse myself in the creative process. That’s great for storytelling, but messy when it comes to scenes, plots and subplots, characterization, settings, and story logic. The first copy edit corrects most of this.
Step 2: Copy Edit 2: This is where I am now. I go through the book again, this time with the text fresher in my mind. Here, I mostly make tweaks to the edits from Step 1. Big changes are rare. This step also goes much faster.
Step 3: Line Edit 1: This is the least fun part of the edit process. I turn on “Show Formatting” in Word and go through the story line by line. This step ensures that all the formatting is correct, and helps to catch unwanted spaces, bad commas and other punctuation, poor grammar, and spelling errors that Word doesn’t catch, like rind when I meant ring.
Step 4: Line Edit 2: In this step, I upload my manuscript to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, add the cover, and order a physical author’s copy. Then, I do another line edit. I don’t know what it is, but I catch errors in a physical copy that I never see on a computer screen, typically 50-100 errors. When this step is done, the book is ready to publish.
As before, I don’t have a publish date yet, but I am targeting February 2024. Quality matters to me when I buy a book, so I try very hard to ensure my books are as error free as I can make them. I’ll post again when I’m closer to publishing. Have an Awesome day!