Edit, Edit, Edit, then Edit some more!

During the last decade, I found time (who says insomnia is a curse) to write five full-length novels. Until recently, writing for me was a hobby. My Mother, Lois Duncan, was a bestselling young adult author and I thought that maybe just a little of her talent had rubbed off on me. The bad thing was in high school I never paid too much attention in English class and the same could be said for my college courses. So when I began my first book DEADLY PERVERSIONS, I was at an embryonic stage when it came to writing. I didn't understand how dialog fit into common phrasing as well as punctuation. And to tell you the truth, I'm still not an expert in such matters. I believe I did get better at writing as each novel exited my computer and found its way onto Amazon, but most of the final versions were not very clean. If you are a novice writer, then you may have experienced many of the same types of challenges. Once my work was posted and purchase, I always received the same response when someone reviewed my book. "Great Story, but the poor editing detracted from the book." So I have begun the arduous process of going back and cleaning up my back catalog. Why? Because I fully intend to become a best-selling author and having an aging catalogue of poorly edited novels is not conducive to attracting potential publishers. If one of your books hit the big time, then you want to make damn sure that your other books are the best they can be. Remember, you probably only get one shot at one book hitting the big time (if that). At that point, readers will start buy your other books, and you want to be certain that those are as a clean as possible, so you don't immediately turn off a new fan. Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or have big money, hiring people to edit your books can be expensive. So the best way I've discovered is to have your friends do it. But believe me, it takes a very special person to edit a book, and it will take a while to find that person. So I suggest the following. Have five people edit your book, in succession. If the first one finds some items that need correction, then make those and send it on to the next. If then next finds 100 more, then make those corrections and send it on to the next. If your next friend/editor next finds 400 more typos, then you probably found a great editor, but still send it on to the next. When no one can find any more corrections, then you might have found your quorum of editors. At that point you can experiment with the order in which you send it out. Don't ever assume, even if you are a great writer, that you will spot all your mistakes. You won't. (I'm sure I've made many in this blog alone). It's your work and you will skip right over things because you mind has already fill in the words before you are done reading them. Out of the five novels I have written, I have two fully re-edited and will be posting the revisions. Agents don't like to see crap and publishers hate it, so make sure you have your new novel as clean as possible before you send it out. And it doesn't hurt to enclose a hundred bucks, even if it is a friend of yours doing the editing. It's not much, but it shows you care and they will take it more seriously and knock it out more quickly.