My NEW Writing Process: Final Edits & Finishing the Manuscript

Hello again! 

I am more or less required to remind you that Alpaca Trouble will be coming out on Saturday, and in honor of the occasion, I am also currently offering the eBook of Sheepish Beginnings for FREE! 

Now, onto the post! This week I'll be wrapping up the updated series on my writing process, by talking about final edits and finishing the manuscript.

After finishing my Beta edits, I tend to go through my book a couple more times, first to read it, and then to edit. The time away from my manuscript always seems to help me see any errors or sticking-points with new eyes. After I'm fairly comfortable with how my book looks, I run it through a grammar checker, before calling in my Alpha reader/editor.

My post-Beta Alpha/editor edits (apologies for that mess of a sentence) are fairly similar to the Alpha edits I talked about in the last post, so I won't subject you to reading through all that again. But, there are a few notable differences, so I'll quickly touch on them. 

1. Our focus is largely on sentence structure, rather than story structure, as the plot should be fairly clean by this point.

2. By the time we are finished with these edits, we need to be more-or-less on the same page. All Alpha edits before this point are subject to author/Alpha reader disagreements, but when there are only a handful of edits left between the manuscript, and a finished book, we tend to put aside any minor disagreements, as we focus our time and energy on any points that would actually cause problems if we left them in the book.

After the last of the Alpha edits are finished (I don't follow a specific number of edits anymore. Instead, we just keep looping through the manuscript until it looks clean, and feels finished.) We run the book through a couple of grammar edits, and a round of proofreading before finally declaring the book finished.

As far as formatting and actually publishing the book, it only takes a few hours of pressing the right buttons, and carefully filling in fields before my book can be released!

So, there you have it, an updated overview of my writing process! I genuinely hope this is helpful to someone. If you have any questions about my writing process that I've failed to answer, please feel free to leave a comment so I can do my best to get back to you.

Have a great day, and keep writing!