Guest Post: How To Botch Up Your Editing Process by Anna Tan

To celebrate the recent release of Coexist by Anna Tan, I’m delighted to welcome Anna to my blog for a guest post.

Plus, during the month of April, Anna’s offering her readers a 50% discount coupon on purchases of Coexist via Smashwords. The coupon code is “ZM78D” and it’s valid from the launch day until 7 May. So, go and take a look at this fantasy novella.

So, here’s Anna’s post: 

How to Botch up Your Editing Process

Hi! First of all, a big thank you to Madeline for hosting me!

My name is Anna and I’m an indie author from Penang. Thanks to the wonders of globalization, the internet, NaNoWriMo and Facebook, I’m here to share with you a little bit about my self-publishing journey.

Coexist is my first attempt at publishing something longer than a short story. I originally wrote it for the A to Z Blogging Challenge in 2014 before deciding that I wanted to self-publish it as a novella. The publishing market (whether traditional or indie) in Malaysia, especially for English books, is still in its infancy, so finding relevant help and guidance hasn’t been very straightforward. Most of the time, I would find resources from the US or from the UK and then figure out how to make it work in my country.

Preparing Coexist for the market has been an interesting journey – here’s how I botched up my editing process!

1. I hired the ‘wrong’ kind of editor

Back in 2014 when I finally decided that I liked my yet untitled fairy tale (I called it “the fairy tale” for a good 1.5 years until I decided on the title) enough to want to publish it, I had no clue how to find an editor. The main problem for me back then (and still is) was that all the good editors being recommended online by fellow indie authors were all Americans and therefore quoted in USD. The rates looked fair at first glance, but when you have multiply it by the exchange rate (about RM3.2/USD at that time; it’s RM4.2/USD now) it was just out of my budget.

I tried googling for Malaysian editors, but the websites I found online sounded clunky to me, and most of them seemed to specialize in editing student’s assignments. I knew about Sharon Bakar, who edited the Readings Anthologies, but I wasn’t sold on it (maybe for the next project, I said). Then I found out that an old college friend of mine was freelancing as an editor. I loved her website, I knew she loved reading, and so I asked her if she could edit for me, and she said YES! (She also gave me a friend discount.)

We worked really well together – don’t get me wrong – and she helped improve the novella by leaps and bounds, but the problem was that her specialization was in corporate copy, not in fiction. I didn’t realize this until I sent a copy to my best friend, an avid reader, who pointed out several formatting errors a good fiction editor should have picked up.

I studied a few novels (luckily I have shelves of them) and realized my friend was right! So I went through the manuscript again on my own to look at those problem areas. For reference, it had a lot to do with how conversations are presented, which is what novels have a lot of, but corporate pieces don’t.

2. I sent it out to beta readers after copy editing was done

When’s a good time to send your manuscript to your beta readers? I don’t think that there’s a hard and fast rule. I think though, that it really depends on what type of editor you’re sending it to and how much budget you have.

With Coexist, I had developed a series of flash fiction of maybe 10K words into a readable novella. I’d already gotten my editor to help me work through a lot of the issues with the flow story, including the copy edit and proofing stuff. Then I sent it out to my beta readers, and based on their feedback, realized that I probably needed to do a whole new rewrite, including expanding the story from its already-expanded 18K words to its current length of 27K words. Remember I said that my editor specialized in corporate copy? Yeah. In this case, it would have made sense for me to have sent it out to the beta readers first before sending it to her, but what did I know then?

If you’re sending it to a developmental editor, who’s going to tear apart your story and put it back together again, then by all means don’t send it to your beta readers until he/she is done (because you want them to have a final version, yes?). But if you don’t have money for a developmental editor and you’re getting more of a copy edit or a proofread done, then please send your manuscript to your beta readers first! Because they are definitely going to tear your manuscript apart and then you’d have to pay for a fresh new edit. Which leads to my next point…

3. I didn’t hire another proof reader

So having spent money on an editor and then rewriting my story after that, you’d have expected that I would get a proof reader to at least go through my novella again, right? Technically, I should have. But by that time, I’d already left my corporate job to pursue this writing thing, and I was a little more budget-conscious than I should have been. Also, I’d just spent a bomb on the cover, so I was counting pennies by then. Besides, I’d read it through like a million times and worried over each sentence and each word, so it should be clean, right?

Wrong.

The good part about this was that I sent it out for reviews in January, 3 months before it was slated to be published. And because I have good friends (reviewers and non-reviewers alike), they emailed me back to tell me about the stupid mistakes I should correct before I embarrass myself in public.

This led me to reading the whole thing again for errors, and when I decided to put it up on Createspace and had to reformat the whole thing for print, I did another round of proofreading (on my own) – and found more things to tweak. I can’t guarantee that the whole thing is super clean or perfect, but I can safely say that it’s probably as good as it’s going to get right now.

Self-publishing has been a very interesting journey and I’m glad that I’ve come this far. I’m looking forward to struggling with the next book (a full-length novel this time!) and facing new, interesting issues with editing.

Have you any editing stories to share?

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About the book:

Jane Hays has been told all her life that it’s dangerous to be out in the forest past sundown. At fifteen, she’s quite sure that it’s all old wives’ tales… yet, why does her village bar the gates every night? Why do they even have gates? When she is caught in an unexpected rainstorm on her way home, Jane ignores all the warnings and seeks shelter in a cottage in the middle of the forest. Soon, she is caught up in a world of magic and beauty – and in the storm of the Fairy Queen’s wrath.

The Fairy Queen is out for blood. There have been intruders – human intruders – in her domain and she will stop at nothing to find them and kill them. After all, it is only fair. She is only seeking retribution for the death that humans leave in their wake.

But Jane isn’t all that she seems to be. And the events of the night aren’t as innocent as they appear.

A tale of magic, fairy creatures and family, Coexist is a novella for the young and the young-at-heart.

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