Step 1

Happy Monday, everybody! Thanks so much to those of you who came out for the event at Page 1 Books on Saturday—we all had a great time, and I can’t wait to hang out with more of you at our next event.

As you know (or, I hope you do), it’s June! That means it’s time for a new series, and I have just the thing in mind.

I started this blog, initially, to talk to you guys about writing, publishing, reading, and everything to do with this wonderful world of words. That being the case, the best thing I could think to talk about this month is getting from Point A to Point B: getting from manuscript to publisher, step by step.

So, what’s step 1?

Finalizing your manuscript

This is often the hardest part for a lot of writers, I’ve found. I’ve spoken with many a writer who was finished writing the book, but didn’t know how to finish the manuscript. Well, I’m here to tell you how to get it done.

First off, finish writing the book

Obviously, yeah? If you want your manuscript to be done, you’ll first have to finish your book, and not just in your head. That means getting it on the page, all the way to the end. But I also mean that you should do an edit, run through it and find your plot holes (I can nearly guarantee you have at least one), and fix everything you can find. Do your basic edits. Get the book to where you think it’s not terrible, but probably still needs some work that you’re not sure how to do. That, my friends, is finishing the book.

Second, self-edit

If you don’t know how to do this, I suggest editing someone else’s work, as practice. Try to read it for errors, to find things that could be worked on and improved. And then go back to your own work, and look at it as though someone else wrote it. To do this, you might need to have a bunch of time to let it sit, to forget a lot of what you’ve done so far. Yeah, it’s okay to not remember what you’ve written. It happens when you’ve written more than five books, let me tell you.

Anyway, make sure you do a decent self-edit. Run through your manuscript at least three times, yourself, before you even consider calling it final. But then, it’s really not final at all, because we have one more step.

Third, proofread

No, I don’t mean running the spellchecker. I mean run through it with a fine-toothed comb and find any errors you can. Don’t worry, you will miss some.

The point of this is to make sure it’s not a mess for the next step, the theme of our next post. See, next we’re going to send it to someone else to read, and we really want it to not be the mess to end all messes, when it finally gets to that stage.

So, write it, edit it, edit it again, and proof it.

If you haven’t done that yet, your manuscript isn’t finalized—although, technically, I’d say that it still isn’t. You’ll see. Don’t worry. :)

[love]

{Rani Divine}