(For those of you who are writers, I’d thought I’d talk a little about the editorial process behind my newest books.)

The process I use to get a novel ready for publication is the same now as when I was traditionally published. I write the entire manuscript with no outside input. When I have a solid draft, I send it to one or more beta readers and then process their comments. This step can be repeated, though I usually don’t, in large part because experienced beta readers are always in short supply. So once I’ve worked through beta-reader comments, the manuscript is ready to be seen by a professional editor.

What does an editor do? It depends what you hire her for and how much detail work you’re after (or you need). The more experience you’ve had with writing, the less supervision you’re likely to need. I’ve written quite a few novels at this point, so I get an overall edit that looks mostly at structure and internal logic.

Judith Tarr served as editor for both The Red: First Light and The Red: Trials. What Judy provides is a letter giving a general assessment of the novel, covering both its strengths and its weaknesses, and then the nitty gritty of specific comments, using Word’s comment feature to annotate the manuscript from beginning to end.

For First Light there were over 700 editorial comments. Trials had only half that—either because Judy despaired or else she really did feel that Trials was initially better written. 😉
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