Writing Hints and Tips

 

You’ve made it. All your hard work has finally paid off. You are officially a contracted author. You sent out your story, you waited while they read it and you heard back from them. If you sent a partial you had to send the rest of it, and you waited more. You got accepted, and then waited for the paperwork. You filled it out and sent it back. Now what?

You wait.

Plain and simple, you wait.

I was told before I ever submitted anything that it seemed as though an author did more waiting than writing. I giggled at all those more experienced authors, thinking they were nuts. Who cares about a little bit of waiting? You’re an AUTHOR! Someone wanted your book! Boy was I wrong.

Once your paperwork is in, it’s up to the publisher to assign you an editor. You need to wait for her to get in touch with you. Then she will usually introduce herself to you, and if she wasn’t the one that read your story when you subbed it, she will tell you she needs to finish reading it, and will get back to you soon for edits. And you wait, checking your email sometimes two or three times a day, eager to get going.

Soon can be a relative term. If they want the story out in a couple months, it can be weeks at the most. If the story isn’t going to come out for a year or more, it can be months at the least.

Eventually, you’ll get an email with your beloved story as an attachment with more deletions, markups, comments and substitutions than you can count. And that doesn’t include the formatting changes, the commas, periods, quotation marks, etc, that will be added or deleted both now and later on.

Brace yourself. You thought rejections were hard to take? Just wait until that five page scene you worked so hard on, researching for weeks, describing the ins and outs of the reasoning behind the obscure dialect that your heroine’s second cousin from a country smaller than Rhode Island speaks gets cut. And that perfect line? The line you know will some day be more famous than “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”? Yup. Gone. And that small scene you were planning on deleting, the one where the hero does something inconsequential? That suddenly needs to be 20 pages long. They want more of it. According to them it’s integral to the story, and it would be weak without it.

There will be things you agree with, and things you don’t. There are often reasons behind the choices your editor makes, and sometimes it is just personal preference. Ask her. If you don’t agree with something she wants done, you can always ask her, in fact, you should ask her. Sometimes you might get to keep that line or scene, others, no. An editor will always strive to make your book better, as her pay is often based on sales of your book, but that doesn’t mean she is always right

There will be more than one round of edits. Depending on how long the story is, and how many things need to be changed, there may be as few as one edit, or as many as five or six. Remember, patience is a virtue, because once again, between edit rounds, you will have to WAIT. Different publishers call different rounds by different names. You will have first and second edits, line edits, proofreader edits, final edits, and edits for the errata.

Each publisher will be different as will each editor. Their caseload, as well as their personal life will affect their work schedule, as do their personal habits. Some like working under pressure, while others prefer a more laid back attitude. And yes, sometimes your two ideas don’t always mesh. I have heard of a story where one author received her 80,000 word book for a round of edits on a Wednesday evening, wasn’t told when it was due, then when she got home from work Friday evening was told it was needed THAT day. Then there are others that have their books completely edited and ready for publishing four, five, even six months in advance.

Somewhere in this process you will get your artwork, and you will feel a little more excited as you see the visual representation of your world. Then you get the actual cover mock up, with your name and title on it, and you begin to feel like it is all for real, that maybe, yes, this is really happening.

After that, it is all downhill. Once you are done with your edits, and have your cover art there is nothing to do except wait. Oh, yeah, and promo. But that’s another article.