Knowing When to Stop: How Much Editing is Too Much?

The idea of writing the first draft of a book – when it’s still in your mind, when you haven’t done it yet – seems like such a large mountain to climb. So when you finally reach the top of that goal, you celebrate. Hard. If it’s your first book, that’s because you don’t realise it’s a false hill, that you aren’t at the top at all. If it’s not your first book, it’s because you know the really tough work is just starting and celebrating each and every achievement is one of the keys to not letting writing drive you insane.

Unless you’re a first draft genius (and nobody is a first draft genius), the amount of time it takes to rewrite and edit your book to publishable standard will be lengthy. For some it will be longer than it took to write the first draft. There’ll be a second draft and a third draft and a fourth draft and on and on it goes.

So how do we know when it’s time to stop editing?

What Type of Editing Should You Ask For? (Yes, There’s More Than One!)

Well, Project October and all the associated intensive writing is over for another year and that means it’s time for Project November and the intensive editing process to take its place. So here’s an appropriately timed blog post on the different types of editing.

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Earlier this year, I was asked if I might be interested in proofreading a coffee table book for a corporate company. It was the story of their beginnings all the way up to their current day successes, a glossy thing with lots of pictures, and none of their internal staff had the time to do it. Sure, I replied, providing my hourly rate and the length of time I thought a proofread would take based on the word count I’d been advised of.

But when the first chapter came through, it was clear it was still in its first draft. It hadn’t been through any of the other editing stages that should come before a proofread. It wasn’t even in the form of a proof (formatted as it will look in the final book with headers, footers, page numbers, columns, photographs, captions, etc). It was just a poorly formatted Word document.

No wonder nobody in the company had the time to do a proofread – they didn’t even know what proofreading was. In fact, they thought it was something else entirely. What they should have asked for was a rewrite, a line edit and copyediting, which then could have been sent to a designer or typesetter for preparation of a proof. Because it’s only after preparation of a proof that you can undertake a proofread.

Seeking Criticism But Wanting Praise

In 2012, I offered my second cousin a free manuscript assessment and he tweeted:

It took me a month and I did a copy edit as well as a manuscript assessment for him. This was his Twitter response: