Last week I wrote a summary about all the various publishing options. It has never been easier to get your book out into the world and available to readers. No longer do you have to write to literary agent after literary agent, desperately hoping that they will love your manuscript enough to shop it to publishers. You can completely bypass that long, tedious stream of rejections and go straight to market.
But just because you can do that, should you?
Is your book ready?
Is it the best it can be?
Have you learnt enough about the craft of writing to make it pleasing for the reader?
Are you ready to have other people read and comment on your work?
One of the advantages of advantages of traditional publishing is that the system acts as a gate-keeper. It ensures that only manuscripts of a suitable quality make it through the net. Yes, this is subjective. We’ve all heard about the book that was rejected dozens of times, then was finally accepted and became a best-seller.
But on the other extreme, if someone has just done NaNoWriMo and written a first draft of a first novel, this is unlikely to read well. The literary agent or small-press publisher would reject it, but now, there is nothing to stop you from publishing it yourself.
My publishing timeline
I began writing Tales of the Countess in 2000. Between 2002 and 2004 I sent it out to a few agents and received rejections for it. All the time I kept writing and re-writing the manuscript to improve it to the best of my ability. But when I look back, there was so much that I didn’t know about writing a novel.
It wasn’t until 2008 that I became aware of my short-comings and realised I needed to learn story structure and how to sprinkle relevant clues to the reader throughout a manuscript rather than dump out a huge chunk of background story. I put the book away in a drawer, took courses and practised those techniques before returning to the project in 2017.
But imagine if self-publishing had been as easy in 2004 as it is now. I could have just interpreted those rejections as my brilliant talent not being recognised and published the story myself. Whilst there were elements of my story that were fun and engaging, it wouldn’t have been such a good read.
After a long break, I was able to return to the manuscript with more objectivity. I did another draft and then listened to what beta-readers said about it. I processed their feedback in another draft before hiring a professional editor. It took yet another draft before it was finally good enough to publish.
Once published, many of the reviews commented on how well-written it was. I took this as a huge compliment given that I wasn’t a natural novel writing and it had taken me a long time to learn that craft. I’m still learning.
Is your manuscript the very best that you can make it?
Be honest, have you really put enough work into your manuscript? Is it really ready or are you just impatient to get it “out there” and/or see your name in print?
Has anyone else read it?
Getting feedback from other people is essential. When you spend months or years on a manuscript, you get too close to it. You might have a picture in your head about what your main character looks like or where they like to hang out, but it is easy to forget to include these descriptions.
If you’re writing non-fiction – some of the terms you use might be obvious to you, because you’re an expert, but you might not realise that they need further explanation to a novice.
Getting a small group of people to read your manuscript will give you valuable feedback as to whether it hits all the elements that you intend it to. Beta-readers will tell you where they got bored, whether your story conjured up a true sense of place, or whether that you have an annoying phrase that you repeat over and over until they want to throw the manuscript to the ground.
Have you hired an editor?
An editor is essential. For fiction there are different levels of edits. A developmental editor will look at your overall story structure and whether the book hangs together.
If your story is solid, a line editor can sharpen up your language and weed out inconsistencies so that your book reads the very best that it can. I hired a line editor for Tales of the Countess and she identified an unpleasant character trait in my main character that none of the beta-readers had picked up upon. It wasn’t my intention for this character to be nasty so I was able to go through, with the editor’s suggestions, to subtly change the way she spoke to some of the other characters and there was one scene that I had to completely re-write.
It wasn’t easy getting this feedback, nor doing the work to walk the tightrope between what the editor recommended and still being true to other aspects of my character – but it made the story much better and I learned a lot from the process.
In both fiction and non-fiction an editor will fact check your references. If you’ve written a story set in 2001 and your character is listening to music on their phone, the editor will point out to you that smart phones didn’t arrive until later in the 2000s. This kind of mistake will annoy some of your readers and lead them to give bad reviews.
Sometimes editing is about what to leave out. I’ve had a couple of friends who have written memoirs. When I have read the early drafts of their work, they have included lots of interesting stories from their childhood, but if those stories don’t serve the main theme of the memoir, then they don’t need to be there. Every book, whether non-fiction or fiction, has a theme. If a section of content doesn’t serve that theme, then it has to go.
Similarly, in fiction an editor might identify a character who isn’t really necessary.
Has the manuscript been proof-read?
The last level of editing is proof-reading. Your manuscripts must be free of grammatical errors and silly mistakes. No matter how many times you’ve read through it yourself, it is hard to see mistakes. I constantly used the word “round” when apparently the correct word was “around”. I didn’t even know that I was making this mistake so would not have picked it up myself, and neither would a spell-checker.
Again, a manuscript full of errors will annoy readers, disturb their concentration and can lead to bad reviews.
What if you can’t afford editing or proof-reading?
There is nothing to stop you publishing without having an edit or a proof-read. If you are really stuck for cash enlist the help of some beta-readers to give you feedback. After going through that feedback and re-working as necessary, find a friend who has a very detailed eye. It needs to be someone who will notice their instead of there or will see that you have extra spaces between words.
This is better than nothing but editors are professional for a reason. Your friends might be able to tell you that something in the middle of a story just didn’t work, but an editor will be able to tell your why and what you need to do to fix it.
Just because you can publish, doesn’t mean your book will sell
Gone are the days when you put a self-published book on Amazon and it will sell thousands of copies without any marketing. There was a period ten years ago when that happened but it is not the case now.
Thousands of books are published every day. Just because your book is available for sale it doesn’t mean that it will. You will have to drive sales and that is a whole other skillset.
If you want to sell lots of copies and build a career as an author then your book has to be good quality.
This takes patience, time and money, irrespective of the publishing option that you eventually opt for.
You might find these articles useful
How Much Does It Cost To Self-Publish A Book In 2022
These articles were posted in the comments of last week’s article by
who writes :Find and Love Your Literary Agent
Traditional Publishing or Self- And E-Publishing
Plodding gently
Cali xx
P.S. If you have found this article useful, please share it. It helps me to grow Gentle Creative and it might be just the thing that a fellow writer needs to read.
Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash
Do you fancy some escapism?
This is a shameless plug for my own novel, Tales of the Countess.
If the news cycle is getting you down or you spend too much time worrying about rising prices and the state of the planet – then maybe you need to escape to a world of chick-lit and talking handbags.
Yes, that’s right, talking handbags. Think Sex and the City meets Toy Story.
It features a modern-day Countess who learns the hard way that you have to be happy within yourself before you get your man.
“It is the epitome of quirky and unorthodox, and takes romcom to a whole other level. I loved it.” Reading Girl Reviews
Or you can purchase at any other bookstore including Apple Books, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org or other geographic Amazon sites. Just search for Tales of the Countess or Cali Bird.
Are You Ready To Publish?
If a word processor can’t identify errors with their/there, maybe try a different word processor. Both Apple Pages and Microsoft Word appear to flag usage problems with those and other pairs reliably. Word also catches double spaces between words and mildly suggests “Only one space between words is better.”
Word also makes grammar and phrasing suggestions, although if you’re writing poetry or dialogue, it might be what you intended.
The site writersdiet.com is intriguing. You can test text up to 1000 words for free to see if your prose has any big problems. Click the “run the test” button with no text to see their example of howler-filled writing.
Apple’s Pages has a text-to-speech function. Although it will read your document (or selected text) in a slightly disembodied voice (several voices available), it will be a different voice than your own and a possible way of identifying text that doesn’t read smoothly enough.
These tools won’t replace a bonafide editor, but they can catch a lot of obvious things. (Note Word doesn’t recognize bonafide as one word, but Pages thinks it’s okay, so sometimes you still need a dictionary.)
Cali - congrats on the book! I’m going to get a copy. If you have an interest, mine’s on sale for 99 cents on kindle until 11/15. Rock gods & messy monsters. I so agree with everything you wrote. Great article! I’m currently reviewing some books thru goodreads and the first one couldn’t have been edited at all. I wonder how many first drafts have been published as books. And don’t get me started on marketing. I’m doing a BookBub ad, kindle countdown deal, Facebook ad, and Amazon ads all right now. I figure I’ll learn through fire, but I’ve taken on too much. so I’m taking myself out for lunch today and to a museum. Thanks for sharing the article!