So, you just wrote ‘The End’ on your manuscript, you’re ready to send it out to agents right away, right?
Yeah, maybe not quite yet.
First things first, you need to do some editing. You may actually need to take some time away from your book before you can really see what needs to be fixed. Take some time to read some great books both in and out of your genre, including perhaps some old favorites. Once you have some distance, read back through your own manuscript to see what works and what doesn’t. Read your dialogue aloud, make a graph with page number as the X axis and conflict as the Y axis to make sure your stakes are high enough and your plotting isn’t too slow.
Now your book is ready to be read by other people!* Probably not agents, editors, or the general public yet, but other people for sure. This is the step where you want to have a critique group, critique partner, or beta readers (or some combination thereof). There are a couple really important things at this step:
– Be open to criticism
– Weigh the comments of your readers against what you think/know about your own work
– Know what you want to get from your readers
This last step is easy to miss, but if you just throw your book at someone, particularly if it is someone who isn’t used to doing in-depth analysis of books and who may love you very much, they may not have much feedback for you that is particularly useful. One of my clients, Kerry Lonsdale, solves this problem by soliciting specific feedback from her beta readers. She is allowing me to share the questions she sent to her most recent round of betas:
1. At any point in the story did you want to put the book down and stop reading? If so, what page and why? If you kept reading, at what point, if any, page number and scene, did you get into the story? What specifically about the story finally captured your interest? Plot, character, writing style, etc?
2. Was X a sympathetic or interesting character? If not, what about her and her situation did not appeal to you?
3. Was the plot engaging enough to keep reading? If not, what specifically about the plot didn’t hold your interest?
4. Were there any scenes or passages you felt were not necessary to the story? If so, please indicate which scenes/passages and why you didn’t think they were necessary.
Your questions will likely change based on your work, and your approach may change based on your personality or those of your readers, but it is important that you have a plan.
There will likely be things that you need to rewrite, based on what you find while editing on your own and the responses from your readers, but it is important that your manuscript is as polished as possible before you send it out to publishing professionals so that your story can really shine.
*If you tend to edit as you go along this step may actually be interspersed with the first one, but if you are early in your writing career this is likely to be more difficult, because you are likely to be less able to spot huge problem areas as you go.
