Baldwin - Fix Your Damn Book!: A Self-Editing Guide for Authors

This book is for writers who have finished a manuscript a novel, novella, short story, or serial and who want to self-publish their work or find an agent or publisher to get it on the market.

The fiction marketplace has never been larger or more competitive, and not just the indie and self-publishing space. Publishing houses are picking up more books than ever before, but there's been such a huge influx of new manuscripts in the last five years that literary agencies are literally being flooded with books far too many books for them to ever be able to represent. As a result, agents and editors are increasingly picky about the books they select, while the slush pile is being transferred to readers in the self-published book market and to websites like Wattpad and Tablo.

Self-publishing has become a liberating and viable alternative to publishing with a house, but it comes with a very real challenge: competition. If your manuscript isnt at a level comparable to house-published books, you're very unlikely to get the positive regard and career you're seeking. There are exceptions, of course theres poorly written, poorly edited stories littered all over the Web with numerous gushing comments but it doesnt change the fact that those stories often receive more ridicule than praise and rarely go on to become commercial successes. They fade back into the sea of mediocrity that is Google without making any profit for their authors.

Market competition is creating demand for better quality manuscripts straight out of the gate. Its at the point where some agents are recommending that new authors get an editor to review their manuscript before they even send their first query letter. For self-published works, significant editing before publishing is now practically mandatory. This leaves new writers with three options: hire a freelance editor to work on their manuscript, somehow convince an editor to do it for a trade of services, or self-edit their own work.

Editing is a professional craft which requires experience, skill, and most of all, time. Editing is a highly specialized profession, and because of that, editors are expensive self included. Hiring an editor to edit a self-published manuscript is out of the reach of most new authors. Between $500-$1000 USD is typical: more, if your book happens to be in very bad shape.

If youre pitching your first book or self-publishing with no idea if youll make a return on your work, those three zeros at the end of the price tag are intimidating. Even if you crowdsource, you still have no assurance that the money spent will matter. To put it in perspective, the average debut self-published novel sells less than 50 copies, and the average house-published novel often doesnt sell many more than that past launch day. Once you have a few titles (or an agent) and some success to push off from, it makes perfect sense to invest more money into editing, but when youre starting out, many authors have to go it alone.

If youre the type of person who wants to fix their own damn book, I wrote this guide for you.

My first novel was completed before I began my career as an editor. As an English Major, I knew some basic stuff about editing. You use editing to make a manuscript better. You connect all the plot threads, fix up weak characters, try to make your first draft dialogue sound sharp. You do your research and get your facts right. If your character is named Sam in Chapter 2, she better be named Sam in Chapter 13... so on and so forth.

I finished my first book in 2009, when I was in my early 20s. I was already an experienced freelance writer and making my living from writing, but I really had no idea what to do with this book. It was a 100K word monster that emerged misshapen from my sweaty brow, a mutated parody of an actual novel. I redrafted and agonized and sent my new rewritten chapters to my betas and got nowhere. To be frank, my first manuscript was a mess.

Worse, I became codependent with my book. I was emotionally bound to my manuscript. I often wanted to throw it at the window or on the ground and jump up and down on it. You may also know this feeling, and the insidious, creeping horror that comes from realizing that this creation which you slaved over for so many hours, which contains real pieces of yourself is now something you cant stand to look at... Especially once the rejections start creeping in.

Not only did my book suffer, so did my queries. I made mistakes on several query letters, which I only spotted after sending them to literary agents... and I never heard back from many of those agents, not even form rejections. I realized that even when you're trying your hardest, if you dont know the tricks of the trade, there are mistakes which are nearly impossible to spot until it's too late.

Fast forward 6 years to 2015. I joined the editorial team for the Australian Journal of Dementia Care, a medical practice journal for people working in aged care and research, and spent two years there before moving to a large Australian not-for-profit organization. I now have four years as a staff editor under my belt and can successfully edit and polish my manuscripts to a professional level in about a month, including rest time. No drama, little fuss, no remaining errors of significance, and only one bottle of Baileys consumed. Well, maybe two. But not all at once!

I love writing, and I love a well-crafted and beautiful book. It is my hope that Fix Your Damn Book! will help you to successfully self-edit your novel manuscript, story, novella, or non-fiction book. This is not a book on how to write a novel, but will help you turn your manuscript into a polished work of art which you can send to agents or publish on Kindle with confidence.

Be warned: there's swearing ahead. I'm Australian, and we swear like pirates down here on the butt-end of the planet. If poop-related words offend you, this might not be the guide for you.

Just as representing yourself in court instead of hiring a lawyer is not ideal, neither is self-editing. I will say, baldly and without hesitation, that self-editing is no substitute for having a well-trained third party editor go through your work. You will never physically be capable of doing as good a job as that objective professional can. There are emotional and physical limitations of the human brain that will prevent you from being as good as someone else. This goes for me, too, even though I edit for a living. I usually hire an editor to go through my books once I am through self-editing them.

If you know what youre doing, you can be about 90-95 percent as good as that hypothetical professional editor, and for your first novels, your query letters, and magazine short stories, 90-95 percent will put you at the top of the slush pile. In addition, if you are a skilled self-editor and can do most of the work, you can probably hire a less expensive editor for copy editing or more easily arrange a trade with another author.

All authors, regardless of whether they have an agent, must also know how to effectively self-edit before they turn their work over to a publisher (or readers, for that matter). You cannot turn in an unedited draft manuscript to your agent: they will send it back and tell you to edit it first. Sometimes, editors may request to see parts of your draft work or a synopsis, but they will expect you to refine your book as much as you can before it lands on their desk. The better a job you do, the faster their editing process is, and the more time they have to spend in discussion with you about the most important editorial considerations of your manuscript. It's also likely that they will make fewer changes, and you won't have to do as many rewrites.