Treat yourself to something nice. The hardest part is over!

Do not look at your manuscript for at least three months. Six is better. Your brain needs time to refresh and your eyes need to reset to “reader mode” so you can see the things you’ve become acclimated to. There’s no getting around this if you want to do your best work.

Now that you’re ready to look at your story through fresh eyes, read it start-to-finish. Take notes as you go. Jot down everything you spot that can be improved or, if it takes less than ten seconds, fix it now. Don’t assume you’ll remember later.

Write a one-sentence description of what happens in each scene. This will allow you to see at a glance the entire shape and flow of the story. Look for redundancies, anything that seems irrelevant, missing pieces, gaps or long stretches between the major story beats, and events that would fit better in a different order. (Note: I highly recommend that you use a beat sheet of some kind to ensure your symphony isn’t missing any crucial notes.)

Outline any changes you want to make, then rewrite.

Next, list each facet of your story that could use some fine-tuning: character voices, motives, personality quirks, place descriptions, tone and mood, excessive use of a handful of crutch words… Maybe your narrator’s voice would be stronger in a different POV or tense. Maybe your comic relief character needs some quippier punchlines. Maybe that scene should be cut or set in a more interesting location. Have you tied off all your plot threads or left some dangling? Can you combine a few characters to thin a bloated cast? Find a way to accomplish multiple plot points in a single scene rather than three? Is that side-quest taking over and slowing down your actual plot? Check for words that end in -ly and see if you can find a better way to describe whatever’s happening there. Consider each sentence and ask whether it really needs that many words. Trim the fat.

Some say you should self-edit until you start changing things back to the way they were. I say, take as many passes as you need until you feel you’ve made it as good as you can on your own. Not perfect. It’ll never be that. Don’t worry about that nagging voice that says it’s not good enough yet. If you feel like something’s off, but you can’t spot the flaws anymore, you’re ready for backup.

Find people who are well-read in your book’s genre and whose taste you generally trust.

Alphas can be...

1. Fellow book lovers who enjoy your story's genre.

2. Writing Groups and Critique Partners.

3. Paid editors.

Ideally, you should use a mix of at least two of these three.

All Alpha Readers: You want Alphas who will be able to spot the tropes and clichés—who enjoy them but can tell you what’s been done to death. Who can say your paranormal romance needs more werewolves and kissing to feel like paranormal romance. Who are ready to fangirl over your love interest but have fallen in love with enough sulky bad boys with a heart of gold to say yours doesn’t have the dimension to stand out in a lineup of paper dolls. In essence, you want someone who is primed to adore the best parts of your story because they’ve already acquired a taste for them and know a good specimen of your genre when they see it.

Writing Groups/Critique Partners: Fellow writers you can exchange feedback with. social media groups, online forums, local writing workshops, and even fan conventions are great places to find writing groups and critique partners. Is this really necessary? Yes. You will learn so much about your own writing by helping others with theirs, and people who are actively practicing the art of writing will bring a different perspective to your craft. This is also your best resource for workshopping solutions to problems with your plot and characters since it’s probably your only chance to talk about your book in a group setting.

In groups, you will often get conflicting feedback. How do you know which advice is best? One rule of thumb is: Democracy wins. If a majority is seeing the same problem, it’s a problem worth fixing.

Manuscript Evaluations/Manuscript Critiques/Book Analysis/Editorial Letters: You can think of this as the first step in the Developmental Editing process. A good Manuscript Evaluation will include 10-20 pages of chapter-by-chapter assessment as well as big-picture feedback. The primary focal points of this evaluation should be:

• story,

• structure,

• and style.

The editor's goal in their feedback should be to support, encourage, and provide actionable steps for improvement so that your story's heart and your unique style shine through.

Some editors (myself included) may bundle this sort Editorial Letter into a single service with Developmental Editing.

These evaluations may or may not include annotations within the manuscript, depending upon the editor. (Mine do.)

The best way to get the most out of this service is to present your editor with a short list of questions or concerns you would like them keep in mind as they read your story.

Rewrite in accordance with your Alpha Readers’ best advice.

This type of edit is sometimes called a Substantive Edit or Content Edit. It's about big-picture feedback: plot, pacing, structure, theme, character arcs, world building, stakes, consistency, etc.

Depending on the editor, this stage of feedback may or may not include an Editorial Letter/Manuscript Evaluation. (Mine do.)

A Developmental Edit will primarily consist of detailed page-by-page annotated feedback throughout the entire manuscript.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite! (No, your developmental editor isn’t going to ghostwrite those scenes for you.)

Line Editing (which is NOT copyediting) is all about making the words on the page come to life. It’s Mark Twain’s lightning and lightning bug. Personally, I feel like this is the stage where writing becomes art. A good line editor knows how to turn a phrase. They’re accomplished wordsmiths. I also feel like they get the most resistance from the writer at this juncture than in any other type of editing.

I get it. You worked hard on each of those words, and at this point, they’ve been through so much. You’re afraid of losing your voice. You’re afraid that your precious word pearls are being cast into the mud as if they don’t matter. They matter. But sometimes, words get in the way of your meaning. The wrong—or just unnecessary—words can be the mud obscuring your story’s pearls. Line Editing is all about clearing away the clutter and making those pearls shine.

This edit focuses on prose, semantics, tone, character voice, dialogue, description, consistency, and streamlining your word count. You’ll be amazed by how evocative your descriptions can become or how your pacing speeds up after a few clipped filler words and added action verbs.

Trust your line editor. They may be mincing words, but nine times out of ten, they’re right. Their job is not to destroy your unique voice; it’s to amplify it. That being said, you don’t always have to accept the solutions they’ve prescribed. Don’t be afraid to fix an issue in your own way. Just don’t leave a problem unresolved after they’ve pointed it out.

The how and when and who and to what end of Beta Readers tends to be a topic that gets overly complicated. Beta readers are simply your first test audience. They don’t have to be avid fans of the genre like your Alpha Readers. Just steer clear of anyone who actively hates your genre and choose Betas who generally enjoy reading. Your mom probably isn’t a good pick—nor is anyone who’s invested in your feelings.

Like Alpha Readers, you should seek out fellow writers to exchange Beta reading favors with whenever able. You can also seek out paid Beta Readers through platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and Reedsy. Don’t expect to get something for nothing.

You can give your Betas questions to keep in mind, a survey to fill out, or leave your directions open-ended to see what comes up. As a general rule, I think the two most important questions a Beta Reader can answer are these:

“Would you buy this book and keep it on your own shelf?”

“Why or why not?”

You know the drill now. Revise, revise, revise!

Autocorrect isn’t always write.

Case in point.

Yes, Grammarly and ProWritingAid and Spellchecker and a dozen other tools are out there to clean up your grammar faux pas. I use them myself to make the simple errors quicker and easier to spot. This frees up a lot of time and energy for me to pick through the text with a fine-tooth comb, backward and forward, and pluck those trickier, slickier weeds. Is slickier a word? Of course not. But that’s the other thing no computer program can do: decide when it’s the right choice to artistically break the rules.

You should never accept a machine’s suggestions on how to change your words unless you understand why it’s making the suggestion. It’s a copyeditor’s job to know the ins and outs of the grammar and spelling, the proper application of punctuation, the homonyms and homophones, the sentences that fragment and the ones that run on… They’re there to spot when there should be a “their” right over there.

A good copyeditor won’t just fix these snags; they’ll teach you how to avoid them in the future. A copyeditor should always include a style sheet with an itemized list of the most common mistakes the writer has made (with an explanation of the correct way). This style sheet is your last line of defense against continuity errors in your manuscript. It should include finalized spellings of all character and place names, timelines, details, and descriptions to ensure consistency from this point onward. The style sheet should also include any instances where artistic license has been taken with grammar and punctuation rules so that the proofreader doesn’t “fix” them later.

Make corrections. Notice I didn’t say “revise.” That’s because we’ve moved beyond the subjective, artistic phases of editing. If your copyeditor is suggesting a change, you should consider very carefully before rejecting their good advice. You will almost always be permitting an error to persist if you do.

Ever wonder why those invisible mistakes suddenly jump off the page right after you send that email? It’s because clicking “SEND” changes the format. Our brains are wired to overlook the familiar. Formatting also allows invisible errors like extra spaces between paragraphs to appear. This is why you should format your book for print BEFORE you hand it over to a proofreader.

By the time a proofreader lays eyes on your story, it should have been buffed and polished till you’re sure they’ll have little to do. Are you just throwing away money at this point? They’ll find plenty, trust me. Making changes always comes with little mistakes, and typos slip in, even during copyedits—usually little things like an extra space between words or a duplicate “the” where a run-on sentence was broken into two. Proofreading cleans up these scraps and minimizes similar additions because proofreaders do not change word choice (as long as it’s grammatically correct) or even correct continuity errors (though they’ll point one out if they do happen to catch it).

It’s not their job to notice that Mark’s eyes are blue in every scene except that one time on page 152 when they were green. Catching that mistake was your copyeditor’s job, as was noting it in the style sheet so you could double-check Mark’s eye color yourself in your most recent round of post-copyedit corrections. Your proofreader’s job is just to make sure that “blue” and “green” are spelled correctly. Your proofreader should refer to the style sheet provided by your copyeditor to ensure the names, dates, and places are all spelled consistently, but many of them read your manuscript backward so they can focus on individual sentences without getting sucked into the story. They couldn’t check for continuity even if they wanted to.

There’s another service occasionally offered with proofreading that many self-published authors miss out on or don’t even know about because too many proofreaders work on manuscripts that haven’t been formatted for print yet, and they may not have heard of it themselves. Typography edits. Typography refers to the way text sits on a page. Awkward repetitions of words that happen to fall next to each other from one line to the next, visible lines dissecting the paragraph that appear when too many spaces stack on top of each other, a single, lonely line at the end of a paragraph occupying a page all by itself. These are visual distractions that can pull the reader out of a scene and make them remember they’re reading a book that can be put down. Chances are, you’ve rarely noticed such things in books because publishing houses hire editors whose entire job is to ensure these things don’t happen. Their presence may be a minor nuisance, but it’s a clear indication that a book skipped a few steps on its way to the printer.

Unless it conflicts with the parameters set in your copyeditor’s style guide, you really should accept your proofreader’s suggestions. They’re your last line of defense against feral grammar Nazis who will find your book in the wild someday and shred it over stray commas.

ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) are the first physical copies of your story that will be read in the actual shape of a book. They may or may not include images, artwork, cover designs, or even a title. The best ARC Readers are people who have the clout to provide reviews and recommendations that will get your book in front of an audience. You should aim to get a few hundred ARCs out into the world. ARC Readers do not get paid for their review and publicity (this would cast doubt on the integrity of their opinions), but they do keep their copy of the book. Their purpose is to generate buzz so that your book enjoys a successful launch.

Even after all your book has been through, no book is truly perfect. A professionally edited book, completed to publishing house standards should have less than one minor error per hundred words. Your ARC readers may spot a few of these lingering malignants and point them out to you. This is your last chance to tune your instrument before it takes the stage.

You made it! Don’t forget to give some love in your book’s acknowledgements to the village that helped you raise your beautiful baby.