Editing Phase: A writers worse nightmare.

You finally type those two words at the end of your story. The End. It truly is a fantastic feeling wrapping up your story. Personally, I was overjoyed that I had finished the writing part of my book. I had no idea that editing was going to be the challenging part. Editing may come easy for some writers but in my experience, it was not.

I have self-edited both of my books and all I can say is that I tried. I am nowhere near where I want to be as a writer. I'm not going to lie, at the beginning of my writing journey there were a lot of google searches. One that I'm not very proud of was the difference between There, Their, they are and They're. I learned it in school but I completely forgot. Of course, each time using it, I understood better.

There is nothing wrong with self-editing, but it runs the risk of missing things. In both of my books, i had a lot of typos and punctuation errors. I reread my stories at least a dozen times and still missed them. For me, everything became a blur after the third time reading the same story. After publishing, I noticed them and fixed the typos, and just republished the corrections. As for the punctuation, I'm still working on it. I'm not the best when it comes to that and I'm still learning with every story I write.

That's when hiring an editor would come in handy. For me, that would be a luxury, but I can not afford that at the moment. Not saying that it isn't worth the money it cost because it completely is! If you're looking for a cheaper option, you can seek out Beta readers. The easiest way to find beta readers is to utilize your social media. I posted on TikTok and people messaged me and that was it. Most of the time they're free readers that will take a look at your work and give you feedback. Once your book is finished it is courteous to send them a free copy, after all, they did help edit.

Those extra sets of eyes can help polish your work even more and maybe potentially catch every error that slipped through your reads. After Beta readers are done and you have changed the mistakes, it's time for formatting. This is different for each publishing platform. I'll discuss formatting in my next blog.