How To Edit Your Own Novel || How To Edit Your Novel Series: Part 1

hello everybody and welcome back to Heart breathing's I am so excited to finally be bringing you guys the much-anticipated how to edit your novel series a lot of you have been asking for this ever since I recorded my how to plot your novel series and this is a toughy but I am so excited to finally tackle this for you guys so if you're interested please keep watching so this is video 1 of a six-part series where I'm gonna be giving you a lot of tips and tricks that I've learned over the years of writing over 25 novels since 2010 where I am going to give you some of my expertise and feedback on ways that I've learned to edit my own novel how to work with beta readers how to work with professional editors how much professional editor should cost and what the different types of edits are that are out there as well as some of my favorite books on editing how to know when your book is done and good enough to start sending out like when you're done kind of fiddling with it and then also the final video in this series will be showing you how I organize and plan my edits so that's going to be a little bit more hands-on but today what we're going to talk about is how to self edit your novel so this is going to be a little bit of a longer one probably the longest one in the series and I'm going to give you a lot of great information but I also wanted you to know that I have put together a 12 page guide for you that's going to take you through each of the steps that I'm talking to today it has a lot of other goodies in it that I can't really talk about as easily on video like a list of unnecessary words that you can usually go through and search and delete in your manuscript as well as some other tips and tricks then it also is going to give you a list of those books that I'm talking about that are great for editing along with links to go by them and lots of other things so I've got the editor stuff the entire series almost everything we're going to be talking about is in this guide and you can get it totally free I put it together just for you guys to be supplementary to this video series so all you have to do is go over to Hart breathing's comm slash how to edit your novel so I will put that link for you here on the screen and but it will also be clickable for you down the description box below or you can just go to heart breathing's calm /blog and you can look for the video series there and there will be links there for you to download now all you have to do is sign up for my newsletter but just be aware you have to sign up under the form that talks about this specific download otherwise you're gonna get a different one because I have lots of different downloads for you guys there but if you're already on my newsletter list you can just go check your email today I have already sent you this guide so just a little bit there so that you have the guide in your hands while we're going through this video now let's get started talking about how to self edit your novel this is a really big one because really how much editing and how much time it's going to take you to edit your novel very much depends on how you wrote your rough draft did you fast draft it with barely putting any details into it did you labor over every word and really plot it out and get it all settled and you've got the whole story structure there or not everybody kind of comes through their rough draft a little bit differently I have one friend who completely fast drops her novel she doesn't even put in dialogue tags she just fast drafts it there's very little emotion there's very little description it's just the story and the nuts and bolts or the bones of the story it's very minimal so when she goes back and she edits her novel she does a very specific round of edits for each thing so she'll go through it one time and add in description and setting then she'll go through it another pass and she'll add in more character dialogue and motions and that sort of thing and then she'll go through an edit for story and she has like six different specific editing passes that she goes through so you may find that my system doesn't totally work for you and that's fine because we're writers we're artists were creatives you're gonna find your own way through your edits but what I'm able to do for you today is just to assume that you've come through your rough draft you have the basics of a story there you've got a pretty good story but it needs work and I'm going to show you kind of one of the best ways that I've found to systematically work my way through my revisions so hopefully this will work for you but of course feel free to modify it to your own level of writing your own way of drafting because if you've really liked the story is definitely set everything's perfect you may not need some of these first couple of passes to take as long as what I do for them you may just need more of a proofread and that's fine too if you've been kind of editing as you go but I'm gonna assume for the purposes of this particular video that you're coming through and you have a true rough draft so where do you start now you will hear a ton of people from best-selling authors to editors to just about everybody in the world will tell you that you need to rest your manuscript you need to put it in a drawer or whatever proverbial drawer and you need to sit on it for a little while maybe a month or whatever and just let it rest I don't do that I'll just go ahead and put that up front I found that I tried to follow that advice early on in my career and I felt disconnected to my story the reason that people tell you to come back to it later to let it rest for a while is that the idea is that when you come back to it with fresh eyes after several weeks or months without working on it you're going to see it differently because you're not so close to it you're gonna start to see errors that you might not have seen if you had just been working on it I totally understand the point behind that the intention behind that however as an indie author who is you know working successful author right now I can't afford to set my book aside for a month or two months and then come back to as fresh eyes and then edit it for another two months because I need to be publishing more quickly than that and I also found that the longer I let it sit the more disconnected I felt to it because I would be writing something else or I'd be writing the next book in the series and that was another big thing for me I couldn't go on and write book 6 until I had book 5 edited and I knew exactly what happened in that book so because I can't afford to take that much time in between books I don't like let my book rest so you can let yours rest if you feel that's best for you or like me you can just dive right into the edits the day after you finish your rough draft it's not going to kill you and even though it goes against some advice other authors will give you I find it to be a great process for me so with that out of the way here's step 1 for me what I like to do in step 1 is I take my entire rough draft and I will create a new outline if you plotted your novel before you were writing the rough draft or as you're writing the rough draft you probably already have an outline that's basic but it probably changed along the way because outlines tend to characters tend to change the story outlines tend to change as you move and you discover more about the story so the first step for me is I go through the entire rough draft and I make a new outline and what this looks like for me is I usually just put chapter 1 and I will write a summary of what happens in that chapter Harper goes to the village and they look for these spell books and this is this and this and this if there's a hook there in that first chapter I will also put what the hook is so for example I'm working on a book right now called the disappearance of Vanessa sha so I would put prologue the night Vanessa disappears Lorelei follows her out into the woods hook vanessa has never seen or heard from again Lorelei's the last one to see her so that would be the summary for the prologue chapter one Lorelei arrives at the cabin two years later on the anniversary of Vanessa's disappearance all the same kids are there you know etc etc so I would just put that in as I go throughout my outline I will also put in things that belong in the overall story structure if you haven't watched my series on how to plot your novel I will link that down below for you as well because that's something you may want to go back and watch so that you understand these sort of beats that I'm talking about but I will go in my outline and I will actually put in the argument against transformation is happening in this chapter the key event or the inciting event is happening in this chapter and I will put what that is so that I'm kind of keeping my eye not only on a summary of what's happened but also where this fits into overall story structure for me this chapter six is the end of Act one and I've got the Act one climax here I would put here's what happens in Chapter six just a brief summary a sentence or two and then I would put Act one climax and I might like color code that put that in a different color or highlighted a certain way and then I would put in what the Act one climax is dun-dun-dun a new body is discovered you know something like that I will actually when we get to the end of this video series and I'm showing you how I organize my edits I will actually show you examples of how I've written this down but for times sake I'm not going into that today just know that I write down an outline of every single scene or chapter and what happens in it where it fits in the story structure what this does for me is it solidified the story in my head I know what I intended to write now I see what I've actually written so even if I don't read through every single word you know at this point I'm not looking for typos I'm not looking for grammar mistakes I'm not even messing with characterization or anything like that I'm just writing down an outline of what I have so far I also I put this in the guide on editing I also have a process where if I hit a scene that's not flowing and I'm in flow and it's just like okay this is a battle scene or this is a really tough conversation that needs to happen and I'm not ready to write it yet I will put in X X which is like a capital X X which is something that doesn't occur in many words and then I will leave myself a note and say go back and you know write this scene where they're gonna have this difficult conversation so while I'm drafting sometimes I will skip scenes and leave myself a little note using those double X's then what I do when I'm going and making this big outline of my story I will search for X X and I will go through and I'll either make note of the scenes that need to be filled in and need to be written sometimes it's a research thing so sometimes it's like okay I don't know how to research like I don't have time right now I don't want to stop my flow of writing to go research about Chicago and what would be the best transportation for her to get from here to there so I'll just leave myself a note xx research how Frankie would get from her dorm to downtown and I won't actually put it in the story so when I go through this first step and I'm making my outline I will usually go back and do that research fill in those holes write those scenes if I can or I'll make a note on my outline that I've skipped a scene here and that I need to go back and write it so that's step one pretty easy step because I'm just making notes about what I've already written step two is where we start to get into some of the hard stuff so step two is where I analyze that outline and I begin to look at story structure and craft and I begin to look at the big picture items now again in step two I'm not looking at typos and exact word choice and you know the emotion of this exact moment and I'm not getting nitpicky line by line at this point I'm still looking at kind of the overarching big-picture things I'm putting the structure of my story together so if we were building a house here at this point you know with step one I would have put the foundation in and step two now I'm actually building the structure so that it's going to look like a skeleton of a house so I want to make sure that all those little joints and logs and everything you know whatever it is is there so I'm looking at story structure I'm saying do I have a strong enough act1 climax is there a strong enough hook at the beginning and I actually have a huge list of questions that I asked myself to help guide to these edits now that entire list that I typically ask myself is inside this editing guide but I'm gonna go over just a few of them with you here so you get an idea of what kind of questions I ask does the opening of this story have a good enough hook will it intrigue readers enough to make them keep turning the pages so I question that I read back through it and I say is this a good enough hook is it gonna grab people right away or do I need to start a little bit later in the story then I'll ask myself do all the plot points exist in the story as it is right now if not what's missing and if yes are they strong enough so by plot points I'm talking about you know those things I was saying are in my plotting series so do I have an argument against transformation do I have an inciting event and a key event what happens at the act1 climax what is their reaction to that act one climax do I have tests and challenges throughout act - what's the Act - midpoint and is that a strong enough like turns the story on its head moment do I have all of those elements of a good story - is the black moment really black does it feel like a dark night of the soul like all is lost or do I need to do something to make that stronger so I'm going to exam every part of the story structure another question is what is the central conflict in this story is it sufficient to make readers care about what happens so is it cohesive is it focused on a central main conflict does that conflict get resolved by the end so I've got a whole list of questions that I begin to ask myself and this is kind of the tedious part of rebuilding so it's almost like redrafting during step two of my editing and revision process I am rewriting usually massive swathes of the first act and then I usually don't have to rewrite as much until I get to the end but I am at this point rewriting reforming making sure that the story structure is in place that it's good enough that the pacing is good that the conflict is good I'm looking at characterization and I'm saying like do I like these characters do their motivations make sense do they act according to their age and according to genre expectations so I'm asking all of these questions and this for me is usually the longest part of my editing process this can take me weeks of rewriting and refocusing and re centering and I don't like I said worry about the grammar an exact sentence choice if I see something that I just know right away needs to be changed of course I'll change it but I'm not going through the story line by line I'm looking at the big picture items like the pacing and the flow of the story and the story structure and the characters and whether it all fits together as a cohesive story then when I feel like all those building blocks are in place and the story itself is strong enough to support you know the house that's being built here then I'll move on to step three step three for me is my line edit so what I mean by line edit is this is where I actually go through the story line by line now I'm getting picky I'm getting picky about my word choices I'm getting picky about is there enough emotion is this the right dialogue tag I'm looking specifically for repeated words I'm looking for things like show don't tell which as writers we've all heard of this beef or right that you know instead of telling people a conversation occurred we should actually show the conversation instead of telling people about you know the fact that you arrived at this cabin we should actually see our character arrive at the cabin so I'm asking myself like am i showing as much as possible of course there are times when you need to just tell and get it and move on but you'll begin to learn that sort of stuff by instinct and you'll begin to trust your instincts but I'm looking for show don't tell I'm looking for typos at this point I'm looking for errors but I'm also looking for repeated words you know so if I said oh she arrived at the cabin and then she went into the cabin okay well now I've used a word cabin twice in one sentence or four times in one paragraph because when we're drafting we don't always hear the cadence and flow of the words so I'm looking for those repeated words I'm looking at every single line one word at a time and making sure that every single choice is the most concise clear most efficient way and the most powerful way I can say what I'm trying to say at this point hopefully I'm not actually changing the story because I did that in step 2 but sometimes here I also begin when I'm looking at exact word choice and character emotion I may realize that you know what this character's motivation is not as strong as it needs to be so for the most part in step 3 I'm doing this line by line edit sometimes they're still going to come some rewrites that happen with this because I'll realize something isn't strong enough or it's not coming together so in the handout that I have for you guys I do have a list of things like here are the main things I look at during this stage of the revision process word choice it's best to simplify as much as possible at this stage you want your words to be as efficient and clear as possible and of course this is going to depend on your genre if you're writing a story set in Victorian England that's like a historical fiction you're gonna have a totally different like tone and aesthetic then you would if you're writing a teen horror set in today's day so it's you want it to be true to your genre and you want to be looking at tone and word choice there but for the most part you do want to have clear concise wording I'm looking for repetition I'm looking for sentence flow does the sentence flow or am i stumbling over words that seemed awkward are there awkward choices unnecessary extra words this is a big one so as you begin to look through your rough draft you're going to notice that you have certain crunch words that you use over and over again like that or just or really so you use these words over and over and what I have for you inside this handout is I have a list of arts here like a little actually all of the almost basically began begin breath breathed completely definitely down even just a whole bunch of these words like really just totally that that we tend to use as crutch words and as you go you may discover that you have crutch words that aren't on this list I would highly encourage you to write down your words that you overuse like maybe you use the phrase like or maybe you use eventually or maybe you use phrases about how someone looks too many times like maybe your character is biting their lip every other word or maybe your character is constantly winking at people or they have certain twitches it's fine to use those a few times to establish that this character has their own quirks but you don't want that character every time we see them and every time she speaks to be biting her lip so find your little crutches that you use and you overuse and make a list of those in addition to the words that I've included here now that doesn't mean you have to take out every single instance of the word literally but you don't want to literally use the word literally five thousand times in your novel so just make sure that you're not using it too much or overusing it and you'll start to understand when you go through this line by line and you can even do search and replace with these so I tend to use the word that and just so many times so I will actually do an entire round of drafts round of edits where I will just search for some of these what I call my crutch words and I'll just analyze each sentence every single time a new search pops up and I'll say does it belong there or can I strengthen this a little bit that's going to make your writing so much stronger if you take out those unnecessary words powerful words have you used the most powerful words to get your point across or have you relied too much on a lot of adjectives to describe everything so like instead of saying Harper was really mad you might say fury boiled inside her you would come up with just a little bit of a stronger or more powerful way to say it now sometimes you can overdo that that it's like every sentence is almost like hyperbole you don't want that you don't want it to be like over fury raged within her she was a you know bubbling pile of ashes you know whatever it is that doesn't make any sense but whatever you don't want it to become over or melodramatic but when you do have these moments make them as strong as you can so this is where you're looking for that you're looking for typos did you spell things correctly do you have commas in the right place do you capitalize things consistently in other possible errors so the show don't tell all so you're looking for head hopping here so you if you're in one character's point of view that character can't know what's going on in somebody else's head so I can't be like if I'm Harper and I'm in her point of view I can't say I walked into the room and such and such and such and such and then in the next sentence say Jackson thought something something because I can't know what he's thinking because I'm not in his point of view so that's kind of head hopping is where you're hearing multiple characters point of view now if you're an omniscient POV you're gonna have a different way of writing that where you have a narrator who knows what everyone is thinking but you there's also ways and rules of how to handle that so you want to look at a POV and make sure you're handling it in the correct way you also want to look at tense in this section where you're making sure that if you're in past tense first-person past tense that you stay in first-person past tense and you don't go into present tense or switch it around just to give you a little personal story my saturdayman saga which started out as the peaceful high demons series started in first-person past tense so I walked into the room etc etc when I switched to writing my Fairhope series in 2013 I decided to write it in first-person present tense I walk into the room and I see so it's happening as the story unfolds and I struggled so much with that change then when I decided to move on to my zombie series I wrote that in third person past tense so I actually have three series in three different tenses and POV styles and you know sometimes it just takes a little while to get into that so if you've been writing first-person present tense and then now this new draft you've been working on his first-person past tense you may find that in the first act or so you've really slipped into the old tense that you were working with so you want to make sure that you've got that consistent throughout the entire draft so make sure that you've really learned those rules and you're looking for those sort of things when it comes to step three and you're doing the line edits you might find it useful for yourself and for your own process to take these one at a time so you make a one entire pass where you're just specifically looking at tense and head hopping and making sure the POV is good and you're just focused in on that then when you finish that pass of your draft you might look at it from line one again and be checking for those adjectives and those repeated words and things like that so you might find it better to do very focused editing passes where you're just looking at one specific thing or you might find it more efficient for yourself to just be looking at all of these things and go through it two or three times with these things in mind it's going to be up to you how you want to work your process one thing I do recommend is that when you get to the stage where you're in step 3 try revising it and reading through it once on your computer where it's a digital format and then print it out and try doing it as well on paper because your mind and your brain is going to catch different types of typos and words and things like that when you're actually editing it on paper and I know it sucks to like use so much ink and use so much paper but you can recycle it and it'll be fine but if you don't want to print it out and you don't want to use up the paper or you know hurt the environment in that way then maybe try one time on your desktop one time on your laptop or one time on your desktop one time on your iPad so that you're kind of getting different screens and different so maybe you're sitting in your chair for one round of edits maybe you're lying on the couch and you're doing it on a laptop for your second round of edits just getting out of that environment when you're doing a second pass can really help you discover new things I find that a lot of people will take their rough rough draft print that out and they'll make tons and tons of notes on it personally for me I decided not to print it out at that stage like when it's first done with a rough draft and printing it out because when I see an error at that point I just want to go ahead and change it I don't want to have to make a bunch of handwritten notes and then go in and transfer that to my computer it was a waste of time for me and as an indie author like I said we're always thinking about speed and doing things as efficiently as possible so I don't print it out until I get to step three and this is maybe my third pass of step three where I'm really looking for those typos I'm really like looking for those word choices and things that I might have missed like repeated words then I print it out but for me printing it out in the beginning is kind of a waste of time because when I see those changes I don't want to have to double do it I don't want to have to write it out and input it into the computer I just want to input it when I'm ready to go I'll talk more about that process in the final video where I show how I organize my edits and how I go from one draft in Google Docs to another but that's for another day so when all of that stuff is done and I've got the best word choices I've gone line by line you know the story is set and I've gone line by line and I've looked at every single word I move on to step four step four is something that I did not start doing until I was a good probably seven or eight novels into my career and someone I don't even remember who suggested this to me and it was life-changing because I don't know about you but no matter how many times I go through my manuscript with a fine-tooth comb and look at every single word there's always still arish there's still little typos there's still little things that I missed so step four I will take my entire novel which at this point should be pretty polished and I will put it into a text-to-speech program so that it will read it to me sometimes if I don't have the opportunity to put it on to a computer or I just want to read it to myself I will read it out loud but the point here is to actually listen to your story so far most of your revisions have been done by silently reading your manuscript whether on your computer or on paper but you've been just hearing it in your head and when we do that we tend to skip words we tend to miss words we tend to not hear some of the repetition or the awkwardness of how some sentences might flow but when you begin to read it out loud boy are you really going to catch the error so you're gonna see where this doesn't make sense I missed a word here because when you're physically listening to it or reading it out loud you're going to hear those missed words and you're going to hear those repetitions and you're going to hear the awkward things that you sort of stumble over every single time or that it seemed confusing it doesn't matter whether you read it out loud you have your partner read it out loud to you or you can use a program online one that I like to use is called natural reader it's actually natural readers calm and they have a couple different voices that you can choose from or you can pay for premium voices and you can basically just upload your entire manuscript into natural reader and it will read it out loud to you and you can even speed it up like one and a half times so it goes a little faster so my preferred way to do it is to upload it to natural reader and then have my hard copy that I had printed out before and follow along with it and I'll be making notes as I go of like oh that was an error oh that didn't work out right that didn't sound right and sometimes if I have entire passages that just seem kind of confusing or awkward when the reader is reading it to me I'll go back and read it out loud as well and I'll make changes at that point as well but step four for me is one if you haven't tried this with your draft before please go and try it because you will catch so many errors and you will start to see things in a new way when you're actually listening to your story now again I don't recommend doing this towards the beginning of the process because the story is still clunky anyway do this after you've done your own line edits it'll change your life so step five is the easiest step but you would be just appalled by how many people skip this step I hear from my editors all the time that some people just don't bother running their book through simple spell and grammar check guys is 2019 there is so much technology out there there's no excuse for not running your program through a simple spellcheck now I will say this I have talked on this channel before about how much I love Google Docs I love it I love writing in it it's my favorite program to use but Google Docs does not have a good built-in spellcheck it doesn't always catch spelling errors it definitely doesn't catch grammar errors and it doesn't catch missing words it's just not a great tool there may be some add-ons so if you know of some Chrome add-ons that are good for Google Docs go ahead and link those down below that are like grammar spell checkers I haven't really looked into it but what I do is when I'm finished with my entire manuscript I've gone through all four of the first steps I will download my Google Doc into a word doc and I will put it into Word Microsoft Word Microsoft Word has a pretty good spelling and grammar checker it's not flawless it's not perfect but it will catch double words missed words misspelled words sometimes inconsistencies that oh you spelled this with a capital letter before and now you're spelling it with a lowercase letter so it's going to catch a lot of that stuff it also catches comma errors and things like that like oh you've got two independent clauses here probably should put a comma in between them so it will catch some of those errors now I will give you a little bit of a warning here that no matter what you use whether it's grammarly or word or if Scrivener has built-in stuff to it that's really nice no matter what you're using it is still a computer program it's not a person so it's not going to properly analyze your voice your tone like I write in a lot of sentence fragments because I'm writing teen voice and it's in her head and so a lot of times I'm writing you know fragments of sentences for pacing and for emphasis sometimes word does not like this that's okay I'm the one who's making the ultimate decision because I am in control of my computer program so don't ever blindly just run your novel through one of these grammar checkers and just blindly accept Changez because you're gonna end up with a huge mess you want to go through every single thing just let it bring it up so it'll you'll run spellcheck or grammar check and it'll bring up every single instance of a change and you just examine them or analyze them one at a time think through it does this need a comment does it not you may want to brush up on your Commons and your grammar rules so that you know whether it belongs there or not but accept or decline as you go add things to your dictionary especially if you're writing fantasy and you use words that are strange go ahead and add them to your dictionary so it doesn't pull that up every single time but please run your novel through some kind of spelling and grammar check there are free tools online if you don't want to pay forward but if you have word or if you don't mind paying that whatever it is four dollars a month to get access to the Microsoft suite of tools I highly recommend word because it has done a great job I think with spelling and grammar check alright step 6 you are so close now if you've made it to step 6 you've probably been doing weeks if not months of work on editing your novel and you are so close it should be super polished super professional at this point you're almost done but you don't want to skip this step step 6 is I want you to go through a little bit of a mindset shift the entire time you've been working on your novel you've been looking at it from the point of view of an author I am the author I am the creator I know all the backstory I know how this world works I know the twists and turns and how this you know you've been working on this story possibly for months right if not years some of us you know the ins and outs of this and you've been looking at it from the creators perspective but with step six I want you to switch your brain and start looking at your work as a reader hopefully whatever genre you are writing in is something you've also read extensively in so you understand what the reader expectations are if it's a mystery you know that readers expect to know who done it by the end of the book that they expect to have you know especially if it's police procedural we expect a body on the page if not in the very first chapter within the first few scenes and then we should have another body by Act one and then you know that by the end of this book we should have some kind of dangerous you know montage where all seems lost and then we need to know who done it at the end of that mystery there are certain types of reader expectations that go along with every single genre now that doesn't mean you need to copy someone else's story or be you know cardboard cutout of someone else's story but you do need to understand that there are reader expectations that some readers seek out this type of story for specific types of feelings and things that they expect so what you want to do for sure in this stage is read it like a reader not like an author and try to think to yourself if I didn't know these characters backstories if I didn't know this heroine would I fall in love with her right from the first page or would she annoy me do her actions make sense does it make sense that she's doing all these things sure it might make sense that she goes and does this crazy stupid thing because you know what she's been through in the past and you knows that she's just scared and she's reacting but if you haven't given your reader that background of your character and told them what she's been through or given them hints as to why she's reacting this way and really grounded her in some kind of motivation that makes that action seem necessary or plausible they're not going to love your heroine so you have to be able to switch your mind from author to reader mode and think is this a good hook do I have all the reader expectations for my genre is the story fast-paced or is anything boring enough that even though I wrote it I kind of want to start flipping pages is it too much action do I feel like I can't take a breath do I need to slow down and pace it a little bit slower here after this big action scene if this is supposed to be a romance do they end up together at the end if this is a romance do the characters meet within the first couple of chapters or does it take till the second act for them to me because there are certain rules of each genre that you need to at least keep in mind and if you're breaking them you need to be breaking them intentionally not just because you didn't know better so this is where you really look at it from a readers point of view now some of this stuff you are going to want to ask yourself like is there a good hook and that sort of thing we asked ourselves that and step one but now we're revisiting it now that the story is really well polished we're revisiting it and we're looking at it again from the point of view of a reader and once you feel like you've really got everything that needs to be in place and you've got a really good novel then you can move on to step seven which is finally sending it out to your beta readers your critique group or a professional editor now if you're traditionally publishing and you've had an editor waiting for it or an agent waiting for it so she can shop it this is the point where you're going to send it off to that agent or that editor and you're gonna start to get feedback from them and they will let you know kind of what their process is and at what stage of this process because an agent may want your book you know on stage to to go ahead and start giving you feedback on how to fix your story but for those of you that are indie like me this is where you send it off to your professional editor or to your beta readers I personally send it out to my beta readers first and we're going to talk about that in another video coming up so I'll talk about beta readers and what kinds of questions to ask them even in this guide I have sample questions for your beta readers and stuff like that so you definitely want to download that but also look out for that video coming soon I'm also going to talk to you about what types of professional edits are out there and available to you and how much those are gonna cost you on average we have a lot more to talk about but hopefully this video on how to self edit your novel has given you a really good place to start and truthfully this is one of the most important parts and I realized when I was putting together this guide that really I probably could have done a video exclusively on each of these steps so if you find that you didn't get enough information and you really need more guidance on like step 1 and step 2 which are kind of the biggest steps of the whole process then go ahead and comment down below and let me know yes I want videos where you expand on this I won't be able to do it yet this summer and as most of you know I do have a baby on the way but I could plan a more extensive editing series in the fall for you guys so you got to let me know that you would want that because I started realizing gosh there's so much that goes into editing and there's a lot more that I could say but hopefully this gives you guys a good place to start please don't forget to subscribe to this channel so that you'll get notified whenever new videos come up in this series so go ahead and head over to my website at heart breathing's calm slash blog or heart breathing's calm slash how to edit your novel and download this free guide or if you're already on my email list you can go to your email and search for it so hopefully this guide is going to help to literally guide you through your process as you edit your novel in the comments down below let me know what you thought of this first video where you struggled what editing tips you might have for their community or other people that are reading and whether or not you have actually finished a drafter in the editing stage yourself I would love to hear about your progress thank you guys so much for sticking around for this longer video I hope that it's been helpful for you make sure you subscribe and like this video and I will see you guys in my next one so on Sunday I'm gonna have a planner video that is not about these edits but we're gonna have the next two videos in this editing series will go live next week so make sure you stay tuned alright guys I will see you in the next one bye for now

Channel: Heart Breathings

Views: 10,709

Rating: 4.938633 out of 5

Keywords: writing tips, how to write a book, writing advice, how to edit your novel, how to edit a book, how to write a novel, how to edit your book, book editing, how to edit novel, novel editing, book, books, publishing, literature, young adult, novel, novella, how-to, write, writing, writer, self-publishing, advice, tips, video log, vlog, editing advice, authortuber, heart breathings editing

Id: mmKmCXPndzM

Length: 39min 5sec (2345 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019