I get a lot of bad reviews. Almost all of them attack me personally, and the most common complaint is that I’m a narcissist. I experiment on myself all the time, so I’m the main character in a lot of my examples. In some reviews, people will call me a jerk, say my book is boring and with the next breath say that I inspired them and changed their life.
All of those reviews are fine by me. I’ve only ever asked Amazon to remove one review. That was where a person decided to figure out where I live and post it. That’s not ok. That review annoyed me because I’m pretty serious about my family’s safety. I recorded an entire podcast episode about the time my family’s safety was threatened by a website. You can find a link on the 20K page.
But let’s not digress too far. Those reviews are all annoying, but they won’t kill a book. The kiss of death review is the sniper bullet directly into your cranium. It’s a game-changer.
A review that points out grammatical and spelling mistakes is fatal. A single bad review that mentions anything technical will kill your sales. Be honest with yourself: when you see a book review that mentions bad spelling and grammar, do you still buy it? Me neither.
It’s the ultimate way of calling an author a rank amateur. Amazon is the great equalizer and allows independent authors to compete with massive publishing houses. But one of these reviews will collapse the entire house of cards.
Most reviews are subjective. Some people are going to love your books, and some will hate them. It’s impossible to have only five-star reviews. That world doesn't exist. But a review that attacks your grammar - that’s objective. Everyone can agree that something is wrong with a book with these types of mistakes.
Avoiding the kiss of death review is worth every penny you pay your editor.
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Types of Editing
When your first draft is complete, it's time to set aside the creative process. You have finished your rough draft, and that's great. Many authors get to this point and freeze. If you spend too much time writing that rough draft, it can be overwhelming to try and switch to editing mode. But you are not on this journey alone.
Together, we will go through a rather extensive process to take the book from rough draft to something we’re releasing to the public. We will create a book that we are proud to release into the world.
There are several discrete phases to the editing process. Going through each of these steps is where many a new author falters. Unfortunately, each of these stages is called editing. It can be a little confusing.
Even professional editors have different interpretations of the role of each type of editor. Sometimes, when you reach out to an editor and ask what they do, you’ll find their definitions of an editor, line editor, copy editor, or proofreader is different.
If you hire an editor working from a different dictionary, they might do something totally unexpected.
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The Cleanup Phase
If you dictated your book, we are going to need one other stage: where you check the transcription and clean up the punctuation. The rougher your transcription, the rougher the cleanup phase will be. If you record your book remotely and then run it through Dragon Dictate, like I did, the cleanup phase could take longer than recording the actual book.
Dragon spits out giant blocks of text without any punctuation. Add in a few mistranslations and misinterpretations, and breaking that beast into usable text is a real fight. The text files for this book had no punctuation, no separation between sentences, and each recording was one giant paragraph of inscrutable text.
Based on my experience with cleaning up a one-hundred-thousand-word book, I have changed this section quite a bit since recording on the dock. Attempts to pay someone else to clean up these files for me all failed. In the end, I had to clean up each section on my own. With a book this long, it became a miserable task. I began to dread working on a book that I loved writing so much on the beach.
If you transcribe directly into your computer, the cleanup stage is not a big deal. You added in punctuation along the way so that you can jump straight into traditional editing.
The easiest way to handle the cleanup phase is with a rolling process. Record remotely and each night when you come home, run a transcription through Dragon Dictate. Then run a cleanup on your work for the day. It won't take very long, and with everything fresh in your mind, you will easily decipher even the roughest of transcription errors.
If your book is under twenty thousand words, then you can clean up your book rather easily at the end. Only for longer books do I recommend a rolling cleanup
Hiring a transcriptionist can be pretty expensive, so I know it's not an option for many authors. Hence, saving it for last.
I tried hiring people to clean up my transcriptions, but every effort failed. Put a lot of time into training your software to minimize mistakes. That effort upfront will save you a lot of pain down the road. Believe me, I wish I'd put a few days in working with Dragon rather than using the lazy approach. It really bit me in the bum.
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Editors Galore
After the cleanup, it is time for the rewriting stages. This could very well be the first time you let an outsider see your book. You normally work with editors in this order:
line editor
copy editor
proofreader
If you are working with a publishing house, they may throw in a few other types of editors and even change this order, but if you are self-publishing, this is the most common order.
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The Line Editor
A line editor is going to look at things like:
Are you using too many words?
Are your sentences too long and boring?
Are you repeating yourself with different words?
Is there any unnatural phrasing?
Are there any confusing scenes or dialogs?
Does the book go off-topic?
How many times have you read a book and the author explains the same thing three or four different times? It gets boring and feels redundant. Some authors do this across an entire series. They are so paranoid that a new reader will start with book seven in the series that they constantly re-explain each character's backstory and the rules of their universe. I don't need the author to explain how magic works in the universe seven or eight times per book.
Some authors go in the other direction. They write a series where you absolutely, positively must start with book one and read the stories in order. If you dare to start with book two, you will have no idea what's happening. Without knowing each character, you will be constantly confused.
I just started reading the second book in a science fiction series yesterday. I read book one a few months ago. Unfortunately, this book jumps right into an amazing battle scene and assumes that I know every character by name. There is no opportunity to refresh my memory. There's no chance for me to find out who these different characters are. It jumps right into the story.
It seems like I have to choose between remembering every character from books I read months or even years ago and getting each character's background dozens of times. Some authors constantly beat you over the head with the "rules" of their universe. If I remember who the characters are, I probably remember the science of this series.
[If you are writing a series, the solution is to have a recap at the end of your book. Put a link at the beginning of the digital version that allows people to hop to the end and read it if they want. You can also include a dictionary that has a short biography of each character. Making this section optional is the best way to please new and old readers alike.]
The line editor will help you walk that tightrope in your book between uninformative and boring. It's a tough balancing act. I live in dread that some readers will think I covered certain topics too many times in this book.
Your line editor is there to check for problems in dialogue structure, paragraph structure, and to point out scenes where the action is confusing.
Have you ever read a dialogue scene and after the first couple of back and forths you can't tell who's talking?
I've read more than a few books where I can tell they didn't use a line editor because the dialog goes off the rails. It's annoying, but I understand why it happens.
A good line editor will catch all of these little mistakes and keep your audience from getting confused. They also look for strange changes in tone, weird phrasing, and bad or confusing language. Sometimes we are too descriptive; we use words that regular people don't understand. Sometimes we’re too bland, and we use words that don't have much meaning.
Occasionally we’ll run into moments where our story goes down a rabbit hole. One of the things that happens to me (even in this book, I’ve probably done it a few times) is that I’ll suddenly digress and talk about a different topic for too long, and it will feel like the central focus of this book has been lost. Hopefully my line editor will catch those moments and keep the book on track. The line editor is there to ensure that your pacing and language stay on track.
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Copy Editor
After you finish with the line editor, it's time to dance with a copy editor. The copy editor corrects your spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, tense agreement, verb agreement, and every other grammatical rule I forgot to mention. They also check for consistency in spelling. A character's name should stay the same throughout your book, and “colour” should not drift into “color.”
You might have a word that you want to spell in a particular way. For example, I have a series of products on my website that I call Blueprints; Email Blueprint, Affiliate Blueprint, Blog Blueprint. In those cases, I always want to capitalize the B in Blueprint to let people know that it's part of the name of a product. If I sometimes have a lower case b and sometimes have a capital B, that's weird. It's a mistake, and a good copy editor will chastise me.
A nonfiction copy editor checks for consistency and factually incorrect statements as well. If I make a claim in this book that's wrong because a new study has come out, the copy editor should catch that. They also check for internal consistency.
If at the beginning of this book I promised that you’d be able to write 10,000 words in a day, and at the end I promise 20,000, that's a little bit of internal inconsistency. That would need to be corrected.
The copy editor prepares the book for digital release. Once you have completed this phase, you can definitely upload your book to Amazon.
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Proofreader
Most people mix up proofreader and editor, although they are quite different. The proofreader only steps in after the first copy of the book is printed.
If you use CreateSpace to print the physical copies of your book, they will send you a proof of your book for anywhere from two to seven dollars; the price depends on the length of your book and shipping.
The proofreader looks at the final copy of the book to see if there was a mistake in the printing process. When you move a book from digital to physical, the page numbers reverse. The page on the left on your computer becomes the page on the right in your book. All books in English start on the right side.
The biggest thing I check in the proofreading phase is page position. I don't want a table of contents on the left side with chapter one on the right. That looks weird.
With a digital book, a proofreader would read your book on their Kindle instead of inside a word processor. This allows them to replicate the reader experience.
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Do I Really Need all these Editors?
Before you hire any editor, make sure that you agree on their job description. I rarely use three different people to edit one of my books. I almost never use a line editor because I write nonfiction; it's not as important for what I do. For certain projects, you need to bring in an external voice.
People email me all the time offering their editing services because they are masters of punctuation and grammar. They want to see the book before I release it into the world and are willing to help me out in exchange. I appreciate their offers to help, but I need line editing help more than I need copy editing help.
It helps me a lot when a reader can identify sections that are redundant or boring. I need help with the flow of a book this long far more than I need help with the grammar. I work with an amazing copy editor who catches most of my dumb mistakes.
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Cost Control
Some editors are cripplingly expensive. There are loads of editors who charge more to edit a book than I do to ghostwrite one! Before you hire anyone, ask them exactly what they do. Every editor is different.
They can charge anywhere from a dollar per word to a dollar per ten thousand words. Most editors have prices so high that independent authors could never afford them.
I know that you have a limited budget and don't want to give all of your profits to an editor. In the following sections, I will share my editing process with you. This process is designed to minimize your costs and ensure that you avoid the kiss of death review. We are going to cover some cool ways to slash the cost of your editing process to the bone.
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Watch the Clock
Have you ever wondered why some books announce their release days a year in advance? How does an author know in January that the book will be ready in November?
Allow me to let you in on a little secret. Editors can take a long time. Most editors take months to read a book. I see independent editors offering a turnaround of six to eight weeks. That’s right. You have to wait two full months while someone else edits your book before you can release it.
I don’t have the patience to wait two months to get my book back. That’s just so darn long. I am in the business of selling books, so the moment a book is finished I want to start making money. I wrote Serve No Master in a week. The thought of waiting eight times longer to get an edit back just drives me batty.
You can handle a large portion of the editing process yourself, getting you to your paydays way faster.
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Action Steps
Clean up your dictation before you even consider reaching out to an editor.
Always confirm that your editor is going to do what you expect.
Never put yourself at risk for a “Kiss of Death” review.
Head over to the 20K page to see my tactics for finding great, affordable editors.
Part XXVIII
Editing Stage One - First Edit
Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.
- Nicholas Sparks
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Handle it Yourself
You should handle the first editing stage yourself. If you dictated your book, clean up that first draft. I have links to transcription software and a few of the better services with reasonable prices on the 20K page. Some good transcription companies lower their rates over time. As you send more books, the price per minute goes down.
Once you have a completed rough draft, whether you typed or dictated, it's time to take a break. Spending some time away from your book will reset your brain.
I like to spend at least three days away from a book because that allows me to look at it with fresh eyes. If I start editing a book too quickly, I will have trouble mixing up memories of writing and editing. I might remember editing a chapter that is later in the book. This can cause discontinuity errors and worse.
I might remember chapters out of order that will mess up my editing process. I can't give the book a fresh read if I don't take the time to cleanse my palate. I'm matching the customer experience. A little time away from your book between the creative writing phase and the analytical editing phase is critical.
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Time is Ticking Away
Bringing in outside editors can add months to the book release cycle, and I don't have that kind of time; I try to release at least one book a month. Very few editors read as fast a
s I write; using three editors would push back my release dates by at least a full season.
When you go through a traditional publishing house, you will wait up to two years between book releases. An independent author trying to generate enough money to support a family doesn't have that kind of time. One of the keys to making a living as a writer is volume; the more books you self-publish, the more money you make.
Can you afford to wait two years between books? Of course not!
The whole purpose of the 20K System is to write twenty thousand words a day. As discussed in the habit section, shrinking the time between starting a goal and achieving it is critical to success. If you can write a book in a month, adding three more months between that moment and publishing the book will destroy your focus. You will lose many of the benefits of the 20K System.
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Feel
In order to control our time and costs, we want to handle as much of the editing process as possible ourselves.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 30