The Morning After: You have your edits back...now what?

You hooked up with an editor. Everything felt like it was going to be even more than you’d hoped for. Now you have your edits back and you’re feeling a bit confused.

What now?

Welcome to The Morning After, a presentation that I delivered to the LTUE writing community on August 26, 2023.

If you’re here for a refresher after attending my presentation, thank you for your support! Maybe we’ll even end up in a long-term relationship.

The Morning After: You have your edits back…now what? A presentation by Christine Nielson of Nielson Editing Co.

First, I’m just going to go ahead and apologize for how tiny the font is in comparison to the images. I hope you’re here for the information more than the design. ;) These are images of slides I prepared for the presentation that I didn’t get to use because the screen share didn’t work. Just being real about the world that we are navigating. I’d rather spend my time editing and creating than learning digital design.

Your first focus after you’ve received your edits back from your editor is to understand the content and meaning of those edits. Take some time to first review the edits. If the edit was a manuscript evaluation, then you would have received several pages of notes dissecting all the major areas of your story, such as plot structure, character development, and worldbuilding. This type of edit usually does not involve any notes in the manuscript itself. Review the notes and, if you can, go back through your manuscript to identify the areas of the story which were addressed. In other words, put all the pieces together. You may even want to go through the notes and your manuscript twice. Compile a list of questions for your editor. There should be some form of follow-up conversation included as part of the editing fee. If the edit was a developmental edit or content edit, you will review notes in the manuscript itself. This gives you the option of responding directly to the comments in the document using the reply feature.

Your follow-up with your editor can be done in several ways depending on the preference of both you and your editor. My personal preference is a video call in which we can go back and forth in a full conversation regarding the edits. You or your editor may prefer email, text, or in-document responses. The goal of this first phase is to understand the suggested edits and the reasoning behind the suggested edits. This is not yet a point where you need to make a decision regarding the future of the manuscript, but you probably already had a goal in mind.

Let’s make it happen.

Once you feel that you understand the suggested edits, review the editor’s recommended actions, or next steps, involved in preparing your manuscript for your current publishing goal. What will it involve, in terms of the manuscript itself, to bring it to the level you need or want? Your goal here is not to make any decisions; it is to understand your options for the next steps.

The usual way to ask this is if you want to be traditionally published or independently published. That’s a good place to start. You also need to dig into WHY you are pursuing that particular route to publication. (Or maybe you don’t want to be published at all; maybe this is a personal project and you don’t really care about publication—that’s fair.) If you are pursuing traditional publication, why do you think that is the best way to reach your Happily Ever After as an author? If you have decided to go indie, why is that the best way to reach your Happily Ever After as an author?

I suggest starting with your Happily Ever After. What does that look like? What does that feel like? Close your eyes and picture yourself in that situation. What are you doing? What is your life like beyond just sitting at your computer and typing out the next story? How many hours a day are you working? What kinds of things are you spending your day doing? What does your family life look like? Do you want to spend fourteen hours a day at your computer writing and marketing and doing everything else involved with producing and promoting books and yourself as an author? Or do you want to write for a couple of hours, chat with your agent, play a part in a creative fictional documentary about living in a New York City apartment with writers’ block and deadlines?

Next, truly research what these different routes look like. And don’t necessarily limit yourself to this binary. There are many other paths to publication, without even publication as the end goal. For some of you, publication may just be the beginning. Maybe you want to publish serial stories, or only short works. Maybe you want to move on to screenplays and graphic novels, or write specifically for audio plays.

Write this down. Getting a very solid idea of what you want your author life to look like will help you make decisions about what you will to invest in this (probably first) manuscript.

The goal of this part of the process is to thoroughly define your Happily Ever After…with DETAILS.

You are your first best resource. I mean, you wrote the damn manuscript in the first place. It’s your story, your characters, your magic system and world. You already accomplished a lot of the work.

Now your main job here is to put your skillset up against the work that your manuscript needs in order to reach your Happily Ever After.

BE HONEST.

What are you good at? What are you capable of? And, more importantly, what do you WANT to do? This is why you dug in to that Happily Ever After. What kinds of things do you want to spend your time doing? Making an author career both successful and sustainable is as much about what we don’t take on as what we do. Why do you want the ‘freedom’ of being a creator rather than a 9-to-5er (if that’s your goal—you could love your day job and never want to leave, idk.)? Personally, I hate designing and maintaining my website (my author/retail site, not this one jsyk). I die a little inside every time I have to get on my computer for that task. I really would rather be writing, or even at the dentist. I have decided that maintaining a complicated website that hosts all my author and retail needs is not something I WANT to do.

What’s on your CAPABLE list? Of those things, what do you WANT to do?

Alright, here’s a biggie. What is your budget for reaching your publication—and more importantly author—goals? Consider both money and time.

And be careful with the phrase, “I can only…” We always have the time and money for the things that matter to us the most. That’s why the mom on food stamps can still ‘afford’ her cigarettes and her hair dye.

What are you WILLING to afford? What activities and things are PRIORITIES for your time and money? Consider your time/money budget for being an author. Are you willing to work at your day job a little more to have the money to pay for editing if that is not on the list of things you are capable of or want to do? Maybe that’s easier and makes more sense than trying to spend the time on editing your own manuscript through the writing phases you’re not as good at. The story is still yours. Maybe you are capable of and love editing your own work and are more willing to budget the time to do it yourself than budget the money to pay someone else to do it.

Maybe if you think of the time it takes to edit your story it just makes you want to cry because you don’t know where you’ll find the time between going to the gym and coaching little Timmy’s basketball team. Or your third and fourth jobs. It’s the same consideration with money.

What time and money are you willing to prioritize for this goal?

There are endless paid tools and resources for authors. Many of them are relevant to authors who want to be published traditionally or who want to publish independently. The people who sell these resources actually make more money than most authors ever will. See a need, fill a need.

What are your needs? Based on your capabilities and wants, your budget, and your goal, research tools that are available to fill in the gaps. This is worth part of your budget for time. You can find resources for almost any part of the writing process. There is now even artificial intelligence that can draft your story and help you make edits. The primary rule for using any tool is that it is only as helpful as it is both designed to be and as it is used. For example, Pro Writing Aid can only help you correct errors if you understand enough about writing conventions to understand the changes that PWA suggests and to make an effective decision on accepting the changes.

A quick list of resources to check out just to get you started:

• Plotting/Writing Software—Plottr; Scrivener

• Writing/Grammar Software—Pro Writing Aid; Grammarly

• Artificial Intelligence—ChatGPT; Midjourney

• Publishing Gateways—Draft2Digital; Books2Read; every publishing platform ever

• Formatting Software—Vellum; Atticus

• Audiobooks—ACX; Podium

And, as always, consider your editor to be a primary resource. The more thorough you are, the more informed decisions you’ll make regarding your budget and resources and the less likely you will be to pay for good intentions.

Now that you’ve spent time organizing both your Happily Ever After and your resources, it is time to make decisions and map out a plan. What part of the work involved in getting your manuscript from its current state to your publication goal are you going to take on? What are you going to hire out? What are you going to accomplish with available tools?

Write this down. Maybe run it by some professionals you trust.

Now it is time to execute your plan. Hire services. Subscribe or buy the tools you have decided to use. Butt in chair to get those revisions/edits/new words done.

One. Step. At. A. Time. Leave a little room for your details to change as you learn and grow as an author, and as new tools and information becomes available. This industry is growing and changing rapidly. Get started on your path and pay attention to the road signs.

Goal: Get Shit Done.