Novel Update #5

Hi everyone,

May should be about Mother’s Day and the unofficial start of summer. Instead, I’ve blogged about the Uvalde school shooting and after the leaked draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade I wrote about Abortion and Birth Control in the 18th century. I hope our country can get its act together. Beyond awful current events, it was busy. My kids finished the school year and I finished physical therapy (yay). My husband and I celebrated our 18th anniversary, so that was a bright spot.

Novel Update

Today marks a pretty significant milestone in my first novel journey… I’ve submitted my manuscript to a content editor. Basically, there are three types of editors:

Content editors
Line editors
Copy editors

Content editors

Read your story and point out major things like plot holes, flat characters and lame dialogue, to name a few things. The content editor I’ve hired will give an overall analysis of the story followed by in-depth analysis of each chapter. For my memoir, She’s Losing It!, I skipped this step because how many plot holes can there be in your own life story, right? But since this my first novel I wanted that extra feedback to make sure I wasn’t making any rookie mistakes. My goal, after all, is to get traditionally published, so it needs to be right before I start submitting to agents and publishers.

Line editors

Give a line-by-line review of your work. They check for things like repetitive sentences, pacing and word choice. They also help with copy editing. I used a line editor for my non-fiction fitness book The S.L.I. Method. We shared an online document that tracked changes and I either accepted or declined his suggestions.

Copy editors

Are basically proof-readers. They check for typos, grammar issues and formatting. Since this involves the least amount of editorial feedback the cost is cheapest.

Before I seek a literary agent, I’ll probably run my manuscript past a content editor and a line editor too. This allows me to put my best foot forward and if I don’t get an agent at least it will be ready to go to self-publish.

Goals for Next Month

I’m taking a break from my manuscript. Yahoo! I’ll start working to build up my social media accounts because the first thing an agent does is Google you. Beyond that, I’m going to catch up on reading. I have novels, memoirs, writing craft books, histories, non-fiction political books and even a few Webtoons in my queue.

How about you? Are you writing a book too? What are you up to?

Lisa 😉