Self-Publishing: The Process
Editing
I have never been very good at editing my own writing. I have the unfortunate problem of thinking that things I write are already pretty good. A good editor helps to clear away the misconceptions I have about my writing as they proceed to eliminate or change something in nearly every sentence.
As I edited my recent book, Snapshots of China with the help of several friends, I realized that even though something may be fine, that doesn’t mean that it’s finished. I also realized that once you start editing, it’s hard to stop. There will always be one more sentence that can be better or one more detail you can add. Sometimes you just have to stop.
I wanted to share a little bit about my editing process. Maybe you will laugh at my naivety and offer some suggestions for what I can do next time. Maybe you will follow a similar process as you write your own book. Or maybe you just like to see a little bit of what someone else is thinking when they wrote the book that you now hold in your hands.
As I was writing this book, and then after I wrote it, my first step was to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. When nearly all of those people kindly pointed out the same spelling or grammar errors that I had missed in my quick editing before sending it off, I realized that next time before I give the stories to lots of people, I want to do a more thorough initial editing to catch the basic problems (not too much—but enough that the average reader won’t notice anything).
Phase 1: Culturally Accurate
People in phase 1 provided my initial feedback. Especially for my Chinese readers, I asked them to let me know if there was anything that they read and thought—that’s not right—we wouldn’t really do that. I’m so thankful for a variety of readers who caught many of these problems and gave guidance on how to change them to make every part of the stories culturally accurate.
One problem that I specifically remember is that I had a group of Chinese friends celebrating Christmas together. One of my Chinese friends pointed out that most Chinese people she knew wouldn’t get together and celebrate Christmas unless a foreigner was involved. I could easily change that detail to make it seem more accurate even though another friend said that even though she didn’t celebrate Christmas, it didn’t seem unheard of to celebrate it together. I wanted my book to be relatable to the majority of Chinese people.
Phase 2: Understandable
Another writer friend gave a lot of really helpful editing advice. This friend is American who had only been to China once, and she offered a lot of guidance about what was easy to understand and some things that were confusing. Since my primary audience is Americans, I wanted to make sure that everything I presented would be clear and understandable to my American audience.
Phase 3: Engaging
In the next phase of editing, my primary editor and my good friend Megan who was my primary encourager throughout this process offered some guidance about which stories were most interesting and which ones seemed to be lacking something. We also considered feedback we had received from a variety of sources.
We spent a lot of time talking through the different stories and thinking about what made the good stories strong and what I could do to improve the weaker stories. After this, I went back and added some scenes to several of the stories to make the impact stronger or to show more perspectives of a situation.
Even though this was probably the hardest stage of editing, I think it was also the most fun because I could go back to weak stories that I was struggling to fix with a fresh perspective. I loved adding things to the stories and seeing Megan respond with an enthusiastic—“Yes! That’s so much better!”
Phase 4: Readable
These phases are actually simplified from the actual process. In my editing with Megan, we had three different phases. In the first phase, she offered comments about big changes. Then I changed the stories and sent them back to her. In round two, she did a lot of heavy line editing. I went through and made sure that the stories were still saying what I wanted them to say. In round three, we read through them all again to make sure that we didn’t miss anything. It took a long time, and I’m glad to have a friend who was as committed to this project as she was—it wouldn’t be the book that it is (or will be) without her help.
Right now, my book is in the hands of my typesetter, turning into a book. After he finished the main typesetting, I sent the book to my sister who found a few errors that had slipped through to this stage. The editing is finally done, and now it’s almost time for publication!
If you read my book, and you find any errors or things that don’t make sense, I’m terribly sorry. It is not the fault of these wonderful people who have helped me with the editing process. The problem is that there were so many errors, they couldn’t catch everything. Although I do hate reading a book with many errors, so hopefully you don’t find very many!