EDIT EDIT EIDT TDIE EA@1

Greetings Cosmic Traveler,

I’ll just say it. Editing kind of sucks. It’s fun to write books, it’s not the most fun to clean them up. I don’t hate it as much as some, but at the point I’m at on Book 3 of the Foundry series, I’m worn out. I’m ready to get back to writing NEW content.

So what kind of layers of editing were involved in the Tempering? It’s a chonker of a novel, sitting at 230,000 words, compared to the Foundry’s 150,000 and the Transcendence’s 180,000. Few books are this long in the commercial space, and for good reason.

1) They are more expensive to print.

2) If broken into 2 books, they can be more profitable.

3) They are a pain in the ass to edit, and as a result, it is far more expensive.

Professional editing is paid by the word. And no, AI is not a replacement for a flesh and blood editor. Funny enough, since AI tools have become more readily available I have seen the tools inside Word and other platforms perform at a lower level than they did before (this includes spelling).

If your project has all the money in the world, it is best to do all of the following:

First draft is you getting your ideas out.

• Second draft is you cleaning them up and getting it all in order.

• Third draft involves a developmental editor who helps you figure out if you have a story that will work at all. Make sure the structure of the story works and the high points are met.

• Fourth (is it still a draft?) you go back and make those changes to the story and revise, revise, revise.

• Fifth, your story is solid, so a line editor rips it apart, making individual sentences better.

• Sixth, a copy editor goes through to ensure the format is correct, spelling is right, no grammar issues were missed.

• Seventh, the author drinks themself into oblivion, forgets the project and starts another new one.

For a project like the Tempering to have all levels of these edits, it would have been well over $10,000 before you even got to see the book. And so I had to choose wisely. Many indie authors do.

• First draft, this is where I go through and make a pretty solid story.

• Second draft, I read back through using text to voice to both read and listen, and I make major changes.

• Third draft/Fourth, focused on cleaning up language and flow. Check for continuity issues.

• Beta reader group takes a read. I give a small group of people a few weeks to go through it and raise any questions or alarms.

• Once I am satisfied we have a solid manuscript, it goes to a copy editor. At the size of novels I write, I don’t have the resources for developmental or line edits. Would my books benefit from them? Almost certainly. Do those edits guarantee more commercial success? Guarantee is a strong word, I would say yes, but it might not be more success than it costs to employ those services. If you’re a traditionally published author though, that’s one of the benefits you get.

• Hire a copy editor. Go through the edits they return with.

• Let ARC readers get their hands on it (and my wife! she helps a lot).

• Review ARC notes, and make changes where needed.

• Drink more coffee

Here’s how the edits worked by the numbers for the Tempering:

• At the copy edit stage, I have 6300 edits to review. Whoof.

• At the widest part of ARC stage, I had about 400 notes to review. Some included what the copy editor had already fixed.

• This narrowed down to about a dozen.

• I went back to my original notes and fixed a few timeline pieces.

• We done? Maybe?

So next time you pick up a book and go “they fired all the editors, this is crap” know that authors and publishers, traditional or otherwise, do their best to make the cleanest product. Creativity and format don’t often place nice with each other. And so the process of making is messy. With this is in mind for YEARS I had an affirmation I said every time I sat down to write

“I give myself permission to suck. Editing can be done later.”

Well… we did a lot of it.

All said, I do keep track of my crutches, my pitfalls, my common mistakes, and we fix those often before a copy editor even sees them. I am not a perfect writer, this email likely has errors somewhere, but what I am good at is imagining another world for people to spend a few hours exploring. A place they can get lost.

The Tempering comes out 9/15. Be looking for more details. It’s already live for eBook preorder on Amazon. Cover coming in the next few days (crossed fingers).

Stay safe out there Cosmic Traveler,

-Fitzpatrick Mauldin