I'm hoping to capture some of the process as I prepare Danger Tastes Dreadful for publication, for my own sake and for others as well. With this in mind, I plan to talk about each step of the editorial process.
I got my New Author packet from Clean Reads. It had various forms to fill out including tax forms and forms regarding author information and cover art and so forth. It also had a document describing Pre-Edit guidelines.
I'll admit, I am enough of a newbie at this that I hadn't expected a "pre-edits" phase, but as I went through the process, I grew more and more enamored of it. The reality is, after tweaking here and there over a long period of time, many typos had crept in. Also, a full read through by my wife, an excellent editor in her own right, made it clear that my characters had some inconsistencies, and that some themes were not carried through completely. That latter is because parts of the themes were added after the initial revision process, but were more focused on the beginning and end of the book.
So, I put on my revision hat again, and cleaned up and polished and made things more consistent. There were modifications in almost every chapter.
Now, the pre-edits version has gone off to the publisher, and I will wait many weeks for what I think will be the developmental edit. But I may have missed a step. In any case, so far I am very happy with the process, and am more confident that my novel will be honed to its best form before publications.
