My neighbors must think I’m crazy. For the past two days I’ve been wandering my living reading out loud.
What am I doing? Why, editing, of course!
My last round of editing (there are three, sometimes four that I go through) always consists of me reading my work out loud. In this way I know whether the story flows. Whether the dialogue sounds natural. Whether I’m missing any words that I hadn’t noticed before or made a silly typing mistake such as writing “an” instead of “and”.
But reading a full book out loud takes time! And not only that, but I have to stop every so often to make notes of things which need to be fixed or changed.
Hopefully, I’m done with all of the real writing, unless I come across something that just doesn’t work.
After this last round of editing, my book will go on to my professional editor and my beta readers. Anything that doesn’t make sense to any of them will get rewritten. I ask them all to check to make sure they understand my characters and their motivations as well as the overall story.
Reading out loud, beta readers and a professional editor are all required to put together a book and make it ready for publication. Without each one I wouldn’t—couldn’t—publish my books.
So while my neighbors might think I’m nuts (and I kind of am, but not necessarily for this reason), I’m doing this in order to create a book good enough to be published, worthy of my reader’s time.
Now, my question to you is are you willing to be a part of this editing process. I’m always looking for new beta readers. People who would be willing to overlook a few grammatical mistake (since I send my book to my beta readers at the same time that I send it to my editor) in order to tell me whether my story is good enough. Does it catch your interest? If not, why not? Do you hate the characters or love them? Do you understand them? These are all the questions I ask of my beta readers.
I’ve had some who’ve just read the book and said that they loved it. That’s wonderful, but not really helpful. I’m looking for constructive feedback. Are you someone who would be willing to help me make my book as good as it can be?
Comment below if you’d like to do so! Thanks!
Wow! Here it is February and I haven’t written a blog since the New Year. I’m so sorry. Life has been kind of exciting around here, to the point where I had to move my deadline for “Trapped In Shadow” back to March. Still not sure of the exact release date, but I will let you know as it gets closer.
