how to get a book edited

Once you've got a first draft, you're sat there with an enormous amount of raw material that you cannot possibly be objective about. You've slaved over it and are in no state to look at it and see things with any sort of clarity.

You need an editor.

Where do you find an editor?

Where to find the editor was the question. If you were working with a publisher then this is something they'd cover. In my case, I'd have to look around. I didn't know where to start and with all the freelancer platforms available, the options seemed innumerable and overwhelming.

I read some material from the various self publishing resources - Joanna Penn and Reedsy being the main two I used. Penn recommended some editors but they were out of my price range, particularly as they charge by word count and my draft had come in at over 100,000 words in the end.

Fortunately, I was active on dating apps at the time.

Hinge is a slightly more cerebral experience than Tinder as it doesn't solely rely on looks (in theory). You're obliged to choose and answer 3 questions which are then posted on your profile. These act as things for people to like and then use to start a conversation.

They're also a good way of filtering potential applicants.

Being an avid reader, slightly snobby and genuinely interested in the answer, one of my questions was,

a genuine Hinge screenshot

It probably got the most responses out of anything on my profile, helped me have some interesting conversations and made it easy to filter the showoffs or people who didn't share my taste. One of these conversations led to me meeting my editor.

As we texted about books, I brought up that i’d written a draft and mentioned that I was looking for an editor. She said that that was exactly the line of work she wanted to move in to and that she'd edited a couple of books already. She was looking to build up her portfolio and would be happy to have a look at it.

One of the self published authors I'd taken advice from had told me that he'd used a similarly keen graduate to edit his book and that the only difference between this and one supplied by a publisher to a first timer like me, would be that the freelancer would be keen to impress, thereby doing a better job as they wanted to get into the industry. I thought this seemed promising, sent her the first 100 pages and waited to hear back from her.

She was very kind about the sample, said she'd be keen to take it on and could start very quickly. I was relieved she didn't think it was shit, impressed with her initial suggestions and set some store by her opinion as she wasn't into rugby. Having a degree of approval from someone who was not only objective but was not into the subject matter gave me some confidence. I sent her the manuscript, which I'd cleaned of obvious errors and set out in a reasonable manner, and set about writing some other fragments while she edited the main text.

In the meantime, one of my oldest friends offered to read the draft. He was doing a plastering course and had to negotiate a 90 minute commute each way, giving him plenty of time to kill. I sent him the draft and let him have at it too.

This seemed to me a good arrangement. Someone who was a stranger to me with some professional experience having a more forensic look at the manuscript on the one hand and someone who knew me, who was more conversant with the subject of the book and who could tell me candidly if I was doing something awful on the other.

My friend came back to me quite quickly. His week of work had enabled him to finish the book and he'd made some rough notes and suggestions. We arranged to meet up in London.

It was an odd meeting. We're friends and so usually meet in that capacity. This time I felt slightly on trial and a bit nervous. We're usually up front with each other and I'd been struggling with my retirement from rugby, picking this as a project to get my teeth in to. What if he thought it was genuinely bad?

'This is really good,' he said over coffee in Shoreditch. Relief flooded through me. 'If it was bad, I don't know what I'd say to you. I might just lie.' This gave me pause for thought but I chose to take his first answer.

He gave me some notes in a Google Doc, told me to cut some of the crasser sentences and asked if I’d had it edited. I hadn’t at that point, having just been through myself and cleaned up the text. I was pleased then that it read like it may have been edited already.

My editor took much longer - she had an actual job so was fitting this in as a side project. I couldn't ask her to hurry up but I was getting a bit impatient. I couldn't progress things as it stood.

She came back to me and the extent of her effort became clear to me, as well as disabusing me of the notion that the text was ok as is. There were over 1000 corrections, red lines and comments all over my original document. She'd really gone through it carefully, highlighting words I used over and over ('bizarre' showed up countless times) and had made some wider structural comments too.

There are 2 main types of edit:

The Copy Edit

This is more of a scan for mistakes, checking grammar and making sure that the voice is consistent. There are various options for long form writing but I used Google Docs and the editing features allow people to make changes that you can then approve later, leave comments and highlight or underline specific sections. It makes collaborating on it super easy.

The Developmental Edit

This is the art to the science of the copy edit. Here the piece is considered as a whole, sections are moved, paragraphs can be cut, emphasis can be asked for. This is where someone comes and elevates your work, showing you where you're going down blind alleys and pointing you in the right direction.

The copy edit is important but the developmental edit is where an editor really flexes their muscles and makes your work better. Cross referencing her suggestions with my friend's notes and seeing where they agreed was one of the most useful parts of the editing process. One knew about rugby while the other didn't - if there was consensus between them then I should really take that feedback seriously.

After the Edits

Once I had the feedback, I just had to respond. Firstly I went through and made the corrections using the copy edit - laborious but not too taxing - before taking on the harder task of the developmental edit.

I realised that you can bring an athletic mindset to the process, even if it's maybe harder to apply as it's outside of your comfort zone. The main ways I did this were:

• review and improve - like a video session, you have to take your performance and divorce yourself from it. I had to take the criticism I received, accept that making mistakes didn't make me bad at writing and just work to improve the overall piece. When this is passing or kicking a rugby ball it's easy to go and address. When it's something less tangible, it's a bit more difficult. Nevertheless, adopting the mindset was key.

• kill your darlings - don't be precious. Sometimes you've managed a phrase or a sentence that you're very proud of. Maybe it references another work or makes an in joke that you find funny. The thing is, most people won't get it and will find it alienates them, taking them out of the narrative. If it's good for you but bad for the team, it needs to go. Kill your darlings.

Eventually I had a new piece of work, a finished draft of my book that was far superior to what I’d created in the first place. It still didn’t necessarily feel ready but to all intents and purposes, it could have gone out into the world. This was about 6-8 months of work that had resulted in about 110,000 words of edited prose. I was pretty pleased with myself.