Category Archives: Editing

What are the different forms of editing? (guest post by: Donna Costello)

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Congratulations you have completed your book and now it’s time to start the editing process.

When submitting a manuscript to a publisher it is vital that the work you provide has been professionally edited. It is equally important when approaching an editor for assistance that you know what it is that you want, and the particular service you are commissioning. In this guest post Donna Costello of LunaCreativeAcademy.com explores the different variations of editing so that you can make an informed choice.

Developmental Editing

Developmental editing is an entire overview of your manuscript. This is for writers who are looking to ensure there are no plot holes within their novel or may need assistance in identifying problem areas.
Development editing usually involves:

  • Identifying big picture issues such as characterisation, plot and structure.
  • Guidance on how to resolve them and elements of the writing crafting.
  • Line by line suggestions.

Copy Editing

This is the fine tuning of the manuscript, the editor reviews sentence structure, focuses on prose and makes corrections based on the flow of the text.

Copy editing includes:

  • Reviewing the text, removing repetition, awkward dialogue and the dreaded purple prose.
  • Identifying overwriting and underwriting and making adequate corrections.
  • Direct edits on the manuscript unlike developmental editing where comments are usually made identifying the issues and providing solutions to the writer.

Proofreading
This is the final stage of the editing process and where all the nitty gritty bits of work get done.

Proofreaders usually review the manuscript for grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes. This should be done after the developmental and copy editing stages as changes will be made to the text throughout these stages which will affect the manuscript.

Donna Costello
Creative Writing Coach, Book Editor, Digital Marketer & Author.
donna@lunacreativeacademy.com

 

Vignettes and eBooks

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noun 1.  a decorative design or small illustration used on the titlepage of a book, or at the beginning or end of a chapter. Macquarie Dictionary Publishers, 2019

I recently presented a session on The Well Crafted eBook as part of a workshop on How To Publish an eBook with Ken Vickery at the Bassendean Library. As part of my session I addressed the question of including Vignettes in an eBook. Vignettes can be obtained at a reasonable price from Shutterstock.com.

A sample of vignettes obtained from Shutterstock

Or make your own as we did for Leonie Rogers’ Frontier Defiant.

Shanna and her two starcats

The problem with including a picture in an eBook, however, is that it must be able to be viewed on a variety of screens: from phones, to tablets, to computers, as well as on eBook Readers.

As a result we have now standardised on the image required for the printed version (300 dpi) for the Title Page (which is 590 x 270 pixels). The image for Chapter Titles is half that size (ie 295 x 135). For printed books each image has to be separately set.

When including the vignette in an eBook the following specifications are used (unfortunately this is slightly more technical and requires a little more understanding of the html/css interface/. What we are defining however, is as follows:

  • Width – this is the percentage of the page that is to be taken up by the image.
  • Minimum Width – this overrides the width and sets the minimum number of pixels, as the picture may be unrecognisable if it is too small.
  • Maximum Width – this ensures that the image doesn’t pixelate by getting viewed beyond up its original size.

In summary:

Title PageChapter Page
Width40%25%
Minimum Width438 px200 px
Maximum Width590 px590 px

For an eBook the picture only has to be included the once, and then linked to its location below the chapter number on each chapter page.

7 steps to easier editing revisions

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Person editing paper manuscriptYou’ve just got your Word file back from the editor. You open the file and blanch at the number of changes they’ve recommended. Certainly you can just accept them all – but don’t. It’s your book and we editors don’t always get it right.

Based on Lisa Poisso’s much more detailed post, however, the following 7 steps will speed up the process of moving to the final version.

Before you begin, remember that you really can’t go wrong if you save early and often. Keep saving regularly as you go so that if you make a big mistake (easy to do in the era of global search and replace), you can step back to a recent version.

7 steps to easier editing revisions

  1. read your editorial report
  2. get ready for your first read-through
    1. learn how to use Word’s Track Changes. For help on this see  Track Changes video tutorial
    2. save your edited document with a new name. Use a descriptive file name for your new file that includes the title, editing status, revision status, and date: GirlLineEditedRev1_0613
    3. turn off the Revisions Pane.
    4. change the colour of the edits. Set Insertions to Teal and Deletions to Grey – 25%. Then set Moved From to Grey – 25% and Moved To to Teal (this makes the grey deletions fade away and the teal insertions pop out).
  3. deal with your editor’s comments on a first pass through the manuscript
  4. on the second pass
    1. Reject any edits you do not want to keep (i.e. things you want left as you originally wrote them)
    2. revise edits your editor has made that you’d like a different way
    3. skip over the corrections and edits you like and want to keep. Simply pass them by with no action.
  5. accept All on the rest of the edits
  6. check for remaining comments and edits
  7. get a fresh set of eyes on the manuscript to proofread it before you publish.

For more information, with step by step guides, visit at Lisa Poisso’s original post.

 

The author’s survival guide to Track Changes