Category Archives: Editing

Getting your work read is always a tough gig. You can promote and spam to your heart’s content … and when the first review comes in, it’s a two-star because of glaring errors in your story, lots of passive writing, and you even change point of view halfway through the tale.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had some beta readers who could catch those issues before you sent your work off to the slushpile known as Kindle Desktop Publishing?

Many of the folks reading this already have a network of folks who can read their stories to spot problems from a reader’s perspective. That’s not saying you should replace an editor with your beta readers — both are recommended for everything you publish.

For authors who live in the middle of nowhere, are nocturnal, or are too busy with their home life and/or a supporting job, there is a solution.

Over twenty years ago, former Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) vice-president Dr. Andrew Burt used his savvy tech skills to come up with an online solution to pair beta readers with authors. The website is called Critters.org, and it’s available at no cost. Anyone can join, and the coin of the realm is reviews.

For authors, one has to review other stories in order to get their work on the review schedule. By agreeing to critique at least one item a week, you earn the opportunity to get your work in front of the membership. Folks who are Active (professional) members of SFWA or the Horror Writers Association (HWA) only have to do one per month to maintain their status and to get their work scheduled, since they’re normally at a higher level of expertise than the average novice or semi-pro author. Professionals also get additional bonuses, such as head-of-line priveleges for manuscript reviews.

I’ve used Critters off and on over the years. When I was in a critique group in Denver, I focused on those stories. Now that I’m living by myself in a very rural area of the midwest, I’m reactivation my professional Critters membership. That’s another nice thing about membership — if you’re going to be busy for a time, just letting them know will keep your account in good order. When you’re ready to re-start, another email gets the flow going.

Authors have the option of sending out short stories and/or novels. One can request dedicated novel reviewers, and you can work directly with them. Otherwise, the maximum one can send in is 20,000 words per critique request.

Normally, this is how it works in a typical week:

Critters receive an email, usually on a Wednesday, listing the manuscripts available for critiquing.
The reviewer (you) selects one or more manuscripts on a private webpage.
The reviewer reads the story carefully and writes up a critique of the manuscript.
The critique is uploaded back to the group via email or via a webpage.
The critiques are assembled and sent to the manuscript author and all of the folks who critiqued the manuscript.

When you’re submitting a manuscript to be critiqued, your work goes into a queue. Critiquers who go above and beyond the minimum and professionals get opportunities to get bumped to the front of the queue. When your manuscript is up, it’s sent out to the reviewers as noted previously. After the reviews are received and collated, you get to read them.

Remember, these are, for the most part, reviews from authors and/or readers letting you know how they felt about your work. Some folks will click, some will not. The site rules require everyone to be polite and professional. Even if someone hated your short story about sentient mushrooms taking over a brick, they will only focus on your story, so no troll-inspired “What, were you stoned or dropped on your head as a kid?” remarks. They will say why it did or didn’t work for them.

Don’t expect an inbox full of glowing reviews, however. I’ve found the reviewers on average to be quite astute, and they root out plot issues that are invisible to your critical eye with remarkable precision. The average review is around 800 words, and I’ve had around six to ten good reviews per story. Some things will be repeated — which is important for you to see, since if a large portion of your audience has an issue with something, you might want to focus on clearing that up. Each reviewer will spot unique issues, which you can either ignore or correct.

The group is self-policing, and the Critter Captain, Dr. Burt, is always available if you have any issues or concerns.

Two questions I see brought up are:

Is a story considered published if I run it through Critters.org?
No. The manuscripts are in a private workshop designed to improve the story. It’s not available to the general public.
Won’t someone steal my work?
No, especially since a lot of authors will see that you’ve sent in the story well before it appeared elsewhere. No author wants to be caught plagiarizing stories, especially a group that has a large amount of fellow authors and SFWA/HWA professionals. Nothing is guaranteed, but I haven’t heard of a story getting stolen through Critters in all the years I’ve known about the workshop.

Some additional benefits include getting some recognition when your work gets published (on the page and on the newsletter), and a listing of folks who are interested in forming a local critique group, broken down by states.

For many folks, Critters.org is an opportunity to get their work looked at by someone who isn’t a relative or a friend. It’s a way to get an honest critique in return for yours.

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled US Navy veteran speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®finalist; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, third-party D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

Autocrit.com

January 11, 2016

Guy Anthony De Marco

Editing First Drafts Guy Anthony De Marco 1 Comment

I’ve mentioned Autocrit.com on panels at conventions. It’s a very useful tool that can assist any author when they’re polishing up their manuscript. Even when I’m about to send something off to an editor or getting ready to upload a submission, I usually run it through Autocrit first. It finds many common problems and does a decent first-pass analysis of my work. For example, it flagged the fact that I used “first” too many times in this paragraph.

Autocrit is a paid service, but it will analyze short passages for you. If you subscribe, you get more reports and can upload a full novel. Note that I am not an affiliate, so I get nothing for recommending this service. I liked it so much I picked up a lifetime subscription when they offered one, and I was actually driving to a convention when I pulled over and called it in. Yes, I like it that much.

I pasted an old H.G. Wells short story called “The Inexperienced Ghost” into the chute to run this analysis. The sections below are just a couple of the sections you get. Actually, you get pages and pages of information, depending on how in-depth you wish to delve into the work. You can run through each section and update the text within the website.

Most of the analysis that follows comes from just the “Summary” page.

The opening piece is general statistics. Of course it gives word counts, but it also shows number of uncommon words, number of sentences, and the average word length of the sentences.

Manuscript Statistics

General
Number of Words				4881
Number of Uncommon Words				1062
Number of Sentences				461
Average Word Length of Sentences				11

The next couple of sections show statistics on your speech tags and adverbs used with them. They also compare it with recent best-selling novels so you can see how you match up.

The sections that follow are very handy for me. It lets me know how many adverbs, passive voice, redundancies, cliches, and generic descriptions are in the work. These sections alone are worth their weight in gold, since I sometimes use clichés (like I just did) when I should have said it better and in my own words. Here we can see that Herbert could have cleaned up his prose a bit.

Adverbs
Total Number of Adverbs		61
Top 3	suddenly	9
	really	4
	slowly	3

Passive Voice Indicators
Total Number of Passive Voice Indicators		175
Top 3	was	64
	had	47
	were	16

Showing vs. Telling Indicators
Total Number of Showing vs. Telling Indicators		186
Top 3	it	107
	knew	39
	see	18

Generic Descriptions
Total Number of Generic Descriptions		27
Top 3	very	11
	suddenly	9
	really	4

Clichés
Total Number of Clichés		32
Top 3	the fact is	3
	the thing	3
	as if	2

Now that I know Herbert should do a bit of rewriting. Most of the time I’m in the same boat. Arrgh…darn clichés.

Continuing on, the analysis shows how the pacing is for the first 50 paragraphs. That should be enough to give you a strong indication if your work has a bunch of dead spots. Herbert didn’t do too bad, in this case.

Finally, the Autocrit summary page will give me an indication of the word and phrase repetition. You’d be surprised how invisible that can be after you’ve been banging away on a keyboard for weeks, reading the same thing over and over.

There are more reports I can use to polish the manuscript. One I always check is the combination report under “Compare to Fiction”. The “personal words” highlighter finds the phrases and overused words that you tend to blindly sneak into the manuscript. It assists me when it comes to repeating the same thing over and over, especially since this sentence was flagged as having a redundant structure and a repetitive phrase.

Remember, you can try it out for free. You won’t get all of the reports, but it will give you a good idea of what you’ll get. Will it ever replace a good human editor? Nope. It does take care of the common junk that editors have to flag, and that gives them more time to find the real issues hidden in your book or story.

Website: http://www.AutoCrit.com

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled veteran, a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

Sometimes You Have to Let Go

December 30, 2015

fictorians

Editing Kevin Ikenberry Making Progress as a Writer Publishing No Comments

In October 2014, I signed a contract with Red Adept Publishing for my debut novel, Sleeper Protocol. From February of this year until September, the publisher’s amazing editing team worked with me through six content edit passes and four copy-editing passes. I could say, without lying, that I learned to love the editing process because of the awesome team I had in place. But what I learned this year to improve my craft was that sometimes you have to let go.

You see, Sleeper Protocol went through it’s early stages several years ago as a short story and then novella entitled “Walkabout.” Every time I worked on the basic idea, there was so much more to tell. I fell deeper and deeper in love with the story as I wrote. Strong feelings during the writing process are good because they take us deeper into the scenes, the motivations, and the surroundings of our story. When I made a sweeping change to the story and “appointed” a new antagonist, the book took off. When I submitted the manuscript to Red Adept, I was understandably nervous but I believed that the book’s title, first line, and entire plot would get the publishers attention.

I was right – but one out of three ain’t bad.

In one of the very first conversations I had with my publisher, the working title of Walkabout had to go. There were too many other books out there with the same title or a variation thereof and finding it could present a problem to prospective readers. To my surprise, this wasn’t that difficult to swallow, except that I spent about two weeks trying to use Walkabout in every possible title combination. Nothing worked. I decided to put off searching for a title until the content edits were completed. I spent weeks brainstorming a new title only to find that my publisher and I both came up with the same possible title, and Sleeper Protocol was officially born.

During the editing process, though, I learned the biggest lesson of all. We’re told to put everything we have into the hook. The right voice, descriptions, and purposeful prose will bring the reader in, right? I created what I thought was a great first line only to have my editor immediately tell me it had to go. There was a POV inconsistency in it and it led the reader in the wrong direction – but in my mind it was perfect!

And there was no point arguing about it. My content editor was exactly right. We made the change and re-tooled the first few lines and made the opening stronger. When the very first line gets the ire of your editor, it’s easy to think that the rest of process will be horrible. To the contrary, it gave me a tremendous boost of confidence that she loved the book enough to say “Hey Kevin, let’s do this differently.”

The lesson: don’t hold on too tight. Yes, the story is your baby and you’re understandably anxious about the whole process, but when your team says “consider this” you have to listen. I am glad that I learned to do just that, and I think that the novel is so much stronger than when I submitted it eighteen months ago. Hopefully, you’ll help be the judge of that.

Sleeper Protocol releases in ebook formats on January 5, 2016 with print versions to follow. You can find more information on my website www.kevinikenberry.com. Happy New Year, and I wish that 2016 be a great year for your writing!

About the Author: Kevin Ikenberry

Kevin ikenberry’s head has been in the clouds since he was old enough to read. Ask him and he’ll tell you that he still wants to be an astronaut. Kevin has a diverse background in space science education and works with space every day.

Kevin’s science fiction and horror short fiction has appeared internationally, most recently in the anthologies Extreme Planets and Pernicious Invaders. His debut novel, Sleeper Protocol, is due in January 2016 from Red Adept Publishing.

Kevin is a member of Fiction Foundry, Pikes Peak Writers, and is an alumna of the Superstars Writing Seminar.

He can be found online at www.kevinikenberry.com.

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned In Indy-garten

December 10, 2015

Gregory D. Little

Editing Gregory D. Little The Writing Life 2 Comments

Okay, so that’s not really true. You’ll never run out of stuff to learn as a writer, whether in the traditional or independent realms. I just thought it was a clever title. I apologize if it made you roll your eyes.

Despite my exaggeration, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying I learned as much about the publishing process this year as I ever have, maybe in all the years before put together. When you publish a book yourself, and you’re trying to do it properly, you have to.

I could probably write ten posts on this topic from my experience with Unwilling Souls, but I’ll try and keep it to the big stuff. For instance, did you know that when you’re publishing a print book, you have to set the margins differently for left-hand pages and right-hand pages so words don’t get trapped illegibly down the spine of the book? I didn’t, but thankfully I hired someone who did to help me.

I already knew that the different e-book vendors required different file types. Turns out they also require different sizes and resolutions for the cover image. More than that, the colors of the print cover have to be subtly altered to account for changes that occur when transitioning from digital to print. The format of the image is also strange and counter-intuitive for print. Who knew? My cover artist, thankfu Map With Flourishes lly.

When I drew up my map to be transformed into a digital image for the book by my map artist, I did so on 8.5″x 11″ paper, months before I’d settled on the physical size of the print book. Spoiler alert: shockingly, the book didn’t wind up being 8.5″x 11″ in size, but more importantly, it wasn’t 8.5″x 11″ in aspect ratio either. With some fast, creative thinking, my book’s interior designer and I were able to make it work.

And then there’s the really excruciating stuff, the tax information required by sellers, the decisions about pricing and DRM and keywords to use and categories to place the book under for vendor search engines. Do you go Kindle Digital Publishing Select for the extra exposure or do you open it up to more sellers than just Amazon? Did you want to do a pre-order? Well, did you get everything in place far enough in advance for that? No? Too bad, no pre-ordering for you.

How about ISBNs? Are you going to buy a block of them yourself (for a considerable fee) or are you going to write off getting the book published in brick-and-mortar stores unless they are willing to order it direct from Amazon?

When I set out to self-publish Unwilling Souls, I had no idea of the answers to most of these questions. I didn’t even know most of these questions existed, and there’s an excellent chance I’m still getting some of them wrong. If your book is traditionally published, these sorts of decisions get made for you. The loss of power can be bad, of course, but at least the burden of a wrong decision is taken away from you and placed upon people who hopefully have more experience with this publishing thing. I would be lying if I didn’t say how very overwhelming dealing with all this felt at times leading up to publication day. I hesitated even writing this blog in this way because I worried it would make me appear like I didn’t know what I was doing. And at times, I didn’t. But that’s okay, because I’ve learned a lot and next time will be so much easier.

In the end, I’m damned proud of the book I put together. If there’s one thing I did right, it was to acknowledge that I couldn’t do it all myself. I found a highly talented team of freelancers who helped me through the process, and the final product speaks for itself, I think. My hope is that someone out there reading this will get a glimpse of the magnitude of the decision to self-publish and be a little bit better prepared to field the questions than I sometimes was. Or, if they are already in the middle of the effort and worry that it’s too much to handle, maybe they’ll realize they aren’t alone and feel a bit better.

Just a quick reminder. The Goodreads Giveaway for Unwilling Souls has just hours to go. It ends today, December 10th, at midnight! Click here for a chance to win one of five signed copies!

About the Author: Gregory D. Little

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com) or at his Author Page on Facebook.