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Editing. The dreaded task all writers, both great and small must face. And it is a dreaded task, because after having spent months, maybe even years bringing one's book to life. The last thing any author wants to do is tear it apart. But tear it apart one must, so let's begin, one courageous step at a time to take the hidden gem within those pages and polish it to a high gleam.
Before we begin, it's a good idea to decide whether you want to pitch your book to an agent or self-publish.
The answer to this will impact on your word count. If you want to pitch to an agent then you are going to need to check the word count limit for your genre. This will give you an excellent benchmark for how much you are going to need to cut. Let's say you want to pitch your book, and you have written a romance novel, but your word count is 120,000 words. The industry accepted range is between 70,000 and 100,000 for romance, so right away we know your book is going to have to be trimmed by at least 20,000 words.
However, if you are intending to self-publish, then word count isn't nearly as critical, although there are constraints to word counts and self-published books, too. If your book does have a high word count, you can kiss goodbye to nice, fat royalties, because once you cross the threshold of 145,000 words you will begin to price yourself out of the market. You can always slap a high price on your book, but as an indie author it's unlikely people will pay more to buy your books when they can buy a book from a recognized name for half the price. For example, The Lost Valor of Love is roughly 146,000 words, and is 442 pages in print. It is priced at $11.99. My royalty is $1.04. The rest is taken by Amazon between publishing costs and their cut. So the lesson to be taken from this is: the less your word count, the less your publishing costs, and the greater your royalty. So do bear that in mind when you are writing your opus!
The goal we are looking to achieve is to have a final product that is a smooth, seamless read, without any jarring words/sentences, unneccesary details, useless dialogue, or digressions. To edit well, you need to take some distance to your work, many authors suggest leaving your work to rest for several months so when you come back to it, you can see it with fresh eyes. I agree, although I tend to leave my work for just a few weeks, while it is with my editor, and then carry on once it is back. Different people work differently, that is just how I find I work best.
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