Nitty Gritty

[renegadefolkhero]

I'm in final edits on The Book, which is the debut of my new pen name. It's a larger genre with a broader audience. There's some advice that editing doesn't matter, as edits can be time intensive and supposedly many readers don't notice or care. It's an ROI thing. I get why people say that, but if readers have criticism I don't want "sloppily written" and "typos" to be part of it.

I need to shave off at least 5k more, so I'm going through the very long list of stupid shit I do before I start in on bigger cuts. "Was going to" is by far the darkest of my sins, but rest assured, I have many.

See / saw Hear / heard Think / thought Touch / touched Wonder / wondered Seem / seemed Decide / decided Know / knew Feel / felt Look / looked Notice / noticed Realize / realized Watch / watched Sound Can / could To be able to Note / noted experience / experienced remember / remembered just was going to like said profanity check with a laugh starting make was getting

Comments

[dorchadas]

There's some advice that editing doesn't matter, as edits can be time intensive and supposedly many readers don't notice or care

If this is The Standard Advice it explains a lot.

[renegadefolkhero]

I understand why you say this.

I do a lot of editing passes but without fail, I'll crack a book open a month later and STILL find typos. So despite editing exhaustively, readers may see the mistakes I missed and assume I don't edit at all. They don't seem to notice the absence of mistakes (I don't think I've ever seen a review gushing about perfect grammar or a lack of typos, lol). So I get where the advice comes from.

Short of having multiple editors go over a book, I'm not sure you can get them all, and I don't think tradpub does that either. Lately they seem to be scooping up self-published books that got traction, redoing the cover (if even), and serving it up as-is.