It’s important that at this point we should force ourselves to accept that we are just about to enter a new stage of the book writing process.
Instead of praising yourself for accomplishing what you obviously have, (can you remember how tall and heavy that pile of pages actually was? Great job!) I now want you to start being highly critical of your achievement, to pull it apart, and then once you’ve been cruel, cynical and ruthless about every word you’ve written, then and only then, to put it all back together again.
At that point we will have created what we will lovingly call ‘The Second Draft’.
So how do you do this? How is it achieved?
Quite simply, you read your own book from cover to cover, and every time you spot something wrong, you take a big red pen to your text and either score words out, make notes to add some in, or add a comment on the side of the page about what you may need to do to make something right.
When you’re reading, trying to spot all the obvious mistakes mentioned above, I also want you to look out for bits in the book where you begin to either lose interest in what you yourself have written, or where you struggle to make sense of the flow of a sentence.
Are there sentences which are toooooooo looooonnnnnng?
Or too short?
Do all the sentences flow smoothly, keeping up the pace, or are there some sentences or paragraphs which you have to read several times to understand clearly what is being said?
Are there any parts, or paragraphs which read beautifully but actually add nothing to the story and detract from the pace of the plot?
When you have marked up everything you can find wrong with your book - and remembering at all times that the more mistakes you can find, the better it will be! - you then start the painful and laborious process of sitting down and going through the whole manuscript page by page and editing the word document on your computer.
Now that’s a long sentence. It could perhaps do with some editing!
When this is done, guess what?
Cough…how about, printing it all off and reading the whole manuscript again?
Ah…okay, before you do, let me tell you something important.
Writers can become blind to their own writing. By that I mean, there are certain mistakes which you never spot when rereading the same text repeatedly. Even if you know that a paragraph or sentence may contain a mistake, you may still find it difficult to find!
It’s almost as if, and I actually think this may be possible, that your subconscious and conscious self have memorised all the words on each page and when you read them, you read what you think is there, and not what is actually there.
So, how do you get around this, I hear you ask?
I will suggest three ways.
Firstly, you print off the text in a different size, and a different font from normal.
Secondly, you mix up the pages and read them in a non-sensical order so that you are not reading the story, and hence skimming over the words, but are just reading the words because the story does not flow from one random page to another.
Thirdly, after you have revised and produced your third draft, you turn to an automatic software editing package.
My suggestion is ‘ProWritingAid’, although I know there are others out there. This is an amazing piece of software that scans any text you highlight and will produce a long list of many different types of spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, repetitive words, clichés, etc. It highlights them in different colours and you can then make your way through the sections of text you have fed into the program, and then focus on each highlighted word or expression in turn.
By the time you have fed the whole manuscript through the software programme, and have addressed whatever it throws up at you, you will have removed many of the remaining mistakes.
I suggest you run the manuscript through the software twice, and use as much of the available functionality as possible to help prune, tune and polish your novel.
When this is done, I have a few more suggestions for you.
Although the software packages you can buy now are truly excellent, they still do not pick up all the mistakes. A classic example may be a stray word. A stray word may be spelt correctly, and may not seem to break any programmable laws of grammar, but when you read it with your human eye, you immediately see that the word is out of context, or is just obviously wrong. Sometimes this can come about when the writing package you are using auto-corrects a word you have spelt wrongly, but automatically replaces it with the wrong word.
For example, you may have been wanting to write, “The man ate his favourite food”, but you misspelt the word food, and the writing programme automatically corrects it to ‘foot’.
In this case, the spelling and grammar programme you may be using to correct your book may find nothing wrong with the word ‘foot’, but clearly, it would be rather strange if we were to write about a man eating his favourite foot.
To help weed out all the remaining spelling mistakes or misplaced words, and to find any remaining plot inconsistencies or unfinished story lines that need to be tied up, you need the help of other human beings.
I suggest you find someone who loves to read, but who does not know you very well. You ask politely if they would be interested in reading your work, but with a critical eye.
Most people would love to do this.
For many this becomes a personal challenge.
Not everyone can write a book, but it seems that many people in this world possess the inborn ability to put other people down and be critical.
So, if you ask someone to find and highlight your mistakes, most people jump at the chance.
It’s almost as if, the more mistakes they can find, the more superior they are to you.
Little do they know, that this is exactly what you want!
Having exhausted your own conscious self in the hunt for mistakes, you now actively seek to engage the conscious self of others, and get them to do work for you.
The more mistakes they find the better.
With luck they will demonstrate how wonderfully superior they are to you, by finding every remaining mistake in your book!
Of course, there are others who you will meet who will do this because they are actually very decent, lovely people who just want to help.
I am blessed by knowing some of these, who help me with each of my new books, but from an editing perspective, I would welcome both.
In the hunt for edits, I don’t care who finds them, I am quite mercenary.
I just want to find them. Root them out. Edit them. And get rid of them!
In the editing process, there is one entire class of human being that should never be involved in the editing process or asked to give any realistic critical assessments of your books.
They are called ‘Friends and Relatives’.
Most of these types of human simply do not want to upset you or fall out with you. They could not be critical of your work if they tried.
When you hand your manuscript over to them and ask them to find mistakes and then share an honest opinion with you of what they think about it, the manuscript comes back almost blank.
“Did you like it?” you will inevitably ask, since they are being quite silent and just smiling.
In reply, they smile back.
“I loved it.” They reply. “It was wonderful.”
“Can you suggest any ways to improve it?” you may enquire further.
“No. It was almost perfect,” your mother, or your brother or sister, or your favourite aunt will reply.
You must forgive them.
They think they are being critical. But,…they are just so proud of you, and you were such a cute two year old, that how could they ever say anything negative about you?
So, I think you get the picture.
When it comes to editing, ignore anything your friends and relatives say! They can’t really help you.
Now comes the Public Health and Procrastination wa
rning.
Pay attention!
Extended editing can seriously damage the health of your novel.
By that I mean some people get so scared about ever releasing an imperfect novel to the world, that they edit a book to death.
Once the writer has got himself/herself into an introspective, error-hating, mistake-hunting mindset, rather than risk the opinion of a reader who could possibly read the book and criticise it if it were ever published, they become scared of actually finishing the book and publishing it.
I’ve known people to spend years editing a book, determined to make it ‘perfect’.
In the Irvine Method, we make sure this does not happen.
The purpose of the Irvine Method is to produce a book that tells a story so that others can read it.
The trick is to identify when a book is almost perfect, not when it is 100% perfect.
It’s better to get the book out there, and published, so others can read it, than spend too long editing, delaying and procrastinating.
So, how do you know when it’s ready?
For me, it’s when I hand the book over to a person who doesn’t really know me, and when they hand the book back a week or a few days later, and they have nothing really negative to say.
“I found two mistakes?” they may say. “I’ll show them to you. Were they the ones you were looking for?”
“Yes,” you reply. “They’re the ones I wanted to find.”
Two mistakes? Or eight?
That’s hardly any!
I think you’re now at the point of diminishing returns.
After you’ve corrected these few mistakes, instead of spending the next few weeks chasing down any new ones, I think it’s time to take off the editing hat, and put on the publishing hat.
But, before we get to that chapter, I think you need to read the next chapter very seriously, and complete all the instructions it gives you.
Chapter 20
You are a WINNER!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Having now completed the editing stage and got to your second or third draft I
want you to take stock of what you will have achieved by the time you get to this point.
Some of you will be reading this chapter now for a second time: you read it once before you started your book, and now again, having just completed your latest draft.
The bottom line is, that by the time you get to here you will have achieved something amazing!
You will be a writer.
You will have written a book!
Think about this. It’s an incredible achievement. Writing a book is only a dream for most people.
But you may have written one by the time you read this chapter. And that’s amazing!
If you have not yet written your book, I want you to imagine the feeling of what it will be like when you come back to this chapter in later months and read these words with a full novel now behind you!
Imagine how that will feel.
So, whether you have done it already - or you will have done it when you read these words again and for now you still just need to imagine what it feels like - pat yourself on your back!
When I wrote these words, there were 7.8 billion people in the world.
Only a tiny, miniscule fraction of that population will have ever written a book.
That makes you very, very special.
Let’s try to put that into perspective.
You may be the only person in your school to have grown up and published a book!
You may be the first person in your family to have written a book!
You may be the first person in your village, town or even city to have published a book, depending upon where you live!
Out of all the people you have ever met in your life, you may be the only author.
Can you see how special that makes you?
So, please, close your eyes for a moment, mentally pat yourself on your back, and thank SC for all his/her help.
If you have a bottle of champagne in the house, I think you are entitled to, and really should, open it and share a drink with your loved ones.
You are amazing!
And that’s official!
Chapter 21
Time to decide: Publish or Self-Publish?
Your novel is finished.
It’s sitting there in a neat pile on the table in front of you.
So, what do you do with it now?
The big question you have to answer is whether or not you are going to go down the self-publishing route (Independent/‘Indie’), or the traditional (Trad) publishing route.
Until about 2011, when Amazon opened up its doors for authors to Self-Publish through their Kindle Direct Publishing service, authors didn’t really have much choice. If they wanted to see their book in print, they had to approach literary agents and publishing houses in order to get a publishing contract. Alternatively, they could PAY someone to publish their book and put in it print. The latter practice earned the nickname ‘Vanity Publishing’ because it was targeted at people who wanted to see their books printed, regardless of how good they were.
I would not recommend anyone to go down the Vanity Publishing route. If you are not careful, you could also find yourself falling victim to a scam.
Thanks to Amazon this is also no longer necessary.
As well as offering writers the opportunity to become proper authors by publishing their books in electronic format which can be read on their Kindle electronic readers, it now also offers the possibility of Digital Publishing. This enables writers to upload their text into special software on Amazon which then allows the writer to arrange and edit the text and layout on the pages of a virtual book. Once you have also uploaded a cover design and blurb for the back page, you can then quite literally order as many copies of a paperback version of the book as you wish. Even if you want to order just one copy, you can. It will arrive several days or possibly weeks later depending how you order it and where you live. When it arrives, you will have your very own copy of your very own book!
And, the good news continues: today you can even work with different companies to produce Audio Versions of your books, where voice actors will read your book aloud and record it so that readers – or listeners – can download the book and enjoy it simply by listening to it.
Amazon is not the only company offering this capability, but it is by far the most popular amongst readers and authors alike.
So, now you have your own book, which path should you decide to go down? Trad Pub or Indie Pub?
This is a difficult question to answer, and to be honest, even I don’t know the answer to this. However, the following paragraph may put the answer into perspective for you.
I’ve been writing books since 1995. I’ve now written about twenty books.
Each and every one of them has been rejected by publishers throughout the UK.
I have every right to feel incredibly rejected and downhearted.
Yet, I do not.
Why?
Because thanks to the Indie Publishing revolution I have had the opportunity to find an audience for my work.
So far, I’ve had very close to two million books downloaded from Amazon, which is my main funnel for distributing my books via their KDP Service.
That’s TWO MILLION copies of my books.
ALL OVER THE WORLD!
There are people who’ve read my books in countries across the globe that I will never visit.
It’s worthwhile considering that if I had been successful in the Trad Pub route, my books would probably only have been published in certain countries, so my distribution would never have reached those countries across the globe where some people now actually know my name!
However, so far, I have never walked into a bookshop and seen my books on their shelves.
If you don’t have a Kindle, the chances are you will not have heard of me, and even if you do have a Kindle, the chances are that you still will not have heard of me.
Sadly, I continue to be a small fish in a very big pond.
I still dream of the winning a big book deal with a mainstream publishing house. I still want my books to be found in the large bookshops, sitting on those shelves and tables just beside the entrance, inviting readers to pick them up, skim through their pages, and then BUY THEM!!!! (Please.)
Yet, even though my books have amassed large numbers of five-star reviews on Amazon - at one time I had the highest rated ‘thriller’ available on Amazon Prime that month! - I am continually still rejected by mainstream publishers.
I don’t know why.
Yet, I still dream the dream.
One day, I am determined, I will be given a deal.
Increasingly though, thanks to the Indie Revolution in publishing, at the end of the day, each author seriously has to ask themselves why they still want to be published by a mainstream publisher?
When comparing each of the possible routes, Indie versus Trad, the questions most authors ask themselves include:
How many books will I sell?
How much money will I earn?
How long will I have to wait before my book is published?
Who owns the rights to my book after publication?
Who will market my book?
Will I be able to give up my day job to write full-time?
Unfortunately, except to say that most Indie authors retain the rights to their own books, I can’t provide detailed answers to most of these questions, especially the first two. All I can report is that if you type in a question into your internet browser, such as: ‘How much money do Authors earn?’ the answer will surprise you.
It’s not very much.
In the UK it’s commonly reported that authors earn less than the average UK wage, which means that it’s not really possible for most authors to give up their day job. In other countries it’s the same.
Get Writing! How ANYONE can write a Novel! Page 8
