Diary of a Debut: Editing

Welcome to my Diary of a Debut, documenting the ins and outs of my journey on the road to publication. This week: editing.

They say editing is half the job of a writer. And I’ll admit, I edited for a long time before I was ready to query agents and publishers. I made the manuscript as good as I could on my own before submitting - but that didn’t mean it was finished.

Once the book got signed by the brilliant Neem Tree Press, it was time to pick up the metaphorical pen (or literal keyboard) again. There were a few issues we wanted to tackle with the book - make it a bit shorter, tidy up some moments, make sure it was suited to the target audience. Luckily there’s a whole arsenal of talented people at Neem Tree, so one by one they passed my book around, leaving edit suggestions as they went.

This is the back-and-forth bit. Someone would go through the manuscript, then I would go through their edits. Then someone else would look at the manuscript, rinse and repeat. This is the part that can be tough, because it is repetitive - at times I felt like I’d rather read the dictionary than my manuscript.

Editing can be quite an emotional process, especially since I’d spent ten years working on one book. Sometimes I felt like I was being asked to change something that was important to me. It can be hard to see the wood from the trees, and know if an edit is worth pushing back on, or if I was just being unwilling to kill my darlings. But luckily I wasn’t doing this alone, so chatting it through was really helpful and often made me see that, actually, the editor was right! They were there to make my book better, after all. If I was going to resist an edit, I needed a good reason to.

I’ve heard it takes a village to publish a book, but the editing process proved it. After a few people had made plot and line-level edits to the manuscript, it was time for a final proofread from an external proofreader - good to get some fresh eyes on it after we’d passed it around so much. After that it went to the typesetter to get some proof copies printed - exciting!

Next time: cover designs.

The Diary of a Debut is written by Jenna Adams whose debut novel will be published in 2022 by Neem Tree Press. You can follow Jenna at @jennaadamsbooks and Neem Tree Press at @neemtreepress.