A lil careers advice… for a specific writer.
Oh, I promise you this isn’t me calling anyone out - I do love a bit of drama, but only really if I’m not directly involved in it, so I probably won’t become a gossip account personally.
No, this one’s quite sweet actually - I got an email a couple of months ago from someone asking advice, author-to-author. Specifically, she wanted to ask about editing - how to do it, whether to pay for it, that kind of thing.
Here is the reply I sent her:
Hi [redacted],
Thank you for getting in touch! This is a really tricky question to answer because a lot of it will depend on your budget and other resources you have available, but I’ll tell you all the options I’ve used on different projects and hopefully that will help you decide what’s right for you.
1. You could sign up for a self-editing course which will give you not only some guided support for doing the streamlining and tightening yourself, but will also teach you how to do it for your next project and beyond without having to pay again. This isn’t a cheap option, but you could look at Jericho Writers (they do a course delivered by Debi Alper which is meant to be excellent) or the Urban Writers courses (I did the 6 Month Novel course with them and it was fantastic… albeit VERY expensive)
2. A MUCH cheaper option is to ask some of your writing friends to beta read for you. I have a small group of writer friends and we all swap stories/novels between us and give feedback, and between us we end up doing much the same as a full developmental edit for free for each other. Obviously this assumes you have writer friends to rely on for this - I made mine through a 6 week long writing course delivered by Curtis Brown Creative.
3. I have had both a developmental edit and a line edit by a professional editor I found via Reedsy. Developmental edits are for when you know something is structurally wrong with your story - e.g. in my case I knew the plot was too complicated and the flow was off, but I couldn’t work out why and needed a 2nd opinion. The line edit was essentially a polish, it didn’t touch the plot at all but caught a few plot holes and areas where I’d left in language from an older draft. They were expensive (the dev edit was over £1000 and the line edit £800) but for me they were worth it because I’m likely going to self-publish those books.
4. A cheap and cheerful option: buy a book called The Word Loss Diet by Rayne Hall and go through all the exercises she recommends to tighten up your prose. This is great when it’s not the plot itself that’s the problem but the pace or that the writing itself feels a bit “loose”. I think I paid £3.99 for the book and I have used it with every project I’ve done since, it’s a fantastic resource.
Getting your book ready to go out into the world is a lot of really hard work, and I hope you’re super proud of yourself for even getting the project to its current state!
My final piece of advice would be that if you’re submitting to agents, you really just need the first 3 chapters to SHINE to get their attention in the first instance. You can get “submission package reviews” on Reedsy or at places like Jericho Writers if you’re a member, which can be a cheaper option than a whole manuscript assessment, but again, if you have writer friends who can look at it for you, that’s a much more cost effective way forward.
I wish you every success, I hope you find an agent who’s perfect for you!
Best wishes,
Jess