My Writing Process (part five)- Self Editing

In the last post, I mentioned how the original final draft of Moonbound ended up at 329 pages. That's quite a far tradition to somewhere near 500 by publishing. But if you're expecting smooth sailing directly after you finish writing, I'm sorry to say that that's far from the truth. Nothing in life will ever be easy again. It is chaos and struggle for a long time after while you format, edit, proof, send to beta readers, send to final editors, order the perfect cover art, figure out what platform to publish from, proof again, market, and so on. DISCLAIMER: This course of events was just my personal path as an independent author. I'm not sure how this process works when you are trying to get traditionally published, so this is about the part where my journey stops being helpful. It is plenty entertaining and exhausting, though!

Anyways, all of that is how my book turned from 329 pages to a little less than 500. The biggest step in that direction was formatting, where the change in page size made a huge difference in the final page count. Moonbound went from being written on a standard Google Docs page to 6x9 (at first). That gave it around a hundred twenty more pages. This wasn't all of the changes that were made to the length, though, so I'll start at the top of the revision process.

After finishing writing Moonbound, I did one final round of revisions on my own by inputting the fire into Barnes and Noble Press and printing a copy for proofing- which was a very simple process and really helped me out, though I now know the same function is available by going through Amazon KDP. When I started editing the printed book, I used color-coded sticky tabs to mark certain aspects for review. Most of these were orange sticky notes, for grammar errors. In this process, I found out there were entire scenes I needed to rewrite because I didn't like them or they didn't fit logically. It took me a couple of weeks to get through the paperback editing, and then I had to transfer all the changes to the online version, which I will say was not fun.

This took another few weeks, and I was feeling very discouraged. All I wanted to do was write my little characters and let someone else do the rest, but that isn't how it works with self-publishing (I'm not quite sure about how it works with agents and traditional publishing). I wanted to give up so many times at this point and had to take breaks that spanned days at a time. But eventually, I finished it all the way, including writing a few new scenes, one of which was around twenty pages in length (I'm so sorry for the long chapters).