When I finished THE VERITAS DECEPTION last summer, I felt
pretty good about it: I had edited it at least five times over the preceding
year, gotten input from beta readers and my writing teacher and thought it was
ready to go. Then I received a call from a trusted author friend who had just
finished reading the manuscript. He had read hundreds of thrillers as the
editor of a monthly magazine and he told me that mine was as good if not better
than many of them. He did think, however, that it would benefit from developmental
editing.
He referred me to Jaime Levine, a New York editor who had worked
on over thirty bestsellers. Luckily for me, Jaime was taking on some freelance
projects and she agreed to take on mine. I sent her the manuscript, and we
arranged to have lunch the next month in New York during the Thrillerfest
conference.
When we met, the first thing she said to me was, “I have a
lot of work for you.” Over a three-hour lunch, we got to know each other and
discussed her impressions of the book. She sent me a fifty-page letter with
suggestions to deepen characters, setting, backstory, and pointed out places
where plot lines disconnected.
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I went home and put the letter away, completely overwhelmed.
A week later, I pulled it back out and
got started. I had lots of research to do to support new plot lines, as well as
flesh out existing ones. It took me over two months before I was ready to send
my changes to Jaime, and then she and I met and sat for over twelve hours discussing
and refining those changes. To say I was lucky to have such an amazing editor
is an understatement. I went back to work on the new refinements, and we
repeated the process one more time. By January, I had her blessing to move on
to a copy edit. The copy edit took another two months and by spring, the
manuscript was ready.
Then came the third phase of editing: the proofread.
Amazingly enough, as I sat and read my book for the, let’s say, twentieth,
time, I still found small inconsistencies that I had to fix. And the typos. “Hard”
for “had”, “of “for “off”, and missing “a”s and “the”s in so many places. My
husband just shook his head as the sticky notes on my proof grew until I’d used
an entire pad. I had to keep reading the entire book again every time I found
an error. I started to think that I’d be able to recite the book verbatim by
the time the final proof was approved.
With today’s speed to market and all the fast publishing
options open to authors, it’s possible to write a book and publish it the next
month. But the reality is, if you want a quality book—one that can compete with
all the other wonderful books out there—professional editing is not a luxury
but a necessity.
Lynne is a twitter addicted fiction writer always working on her next book. She is the coauthor of Learn More About CIRCLE DANCE on Amazon, a family saga spanning three generations, that received an endorsement from Olympia Dukakis. She is also a social media consultant and speaker, working with authors to build their brand platforms. Lynne teaches at various workshops and has spoken at the Thrillerfest conference in New York. She is a monthly contributor to SUSPENSE MAGAZINE, and a contributing editor to THE BIG THRILL magazine.
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2 Comments
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