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Dary

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,415
The English Wilderness
wow, I just thought people wouldn't take her seriously since she's a walking anime trope lol.

Nah, it really all comes down to the writing and how you approach it. Context is everything. If you've got a cyberpunk future where a lot of people appear this way and it's the norm, then her appearance will not be a dealbreaker. If you write her in such a way that she comes off as dangerous and scary, then her look becomes a signature. It really all just depends on what you do with the writing. I mean, Stephen King turned a freakin' clown into an icon of horror with It, so it just boils down to how you decide to handle it.

Yup. Anyone who says "this is so anime" needs to broaden their literary horizons. Well, unless you deliberately write her like an anime character, of course XD

I mean, I mentioned Cordwainer Smith back there because I figured your worry was "people will say it's too anime" - Smith was writing about sci-fi catgirls. In the 50s.
 

NoirSuede

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
414
I don't think most people who reads novels would even notice anime tropes like that, but thanks guys!

Speaking of Cordwainer Smith, maybe he's the one that inspired anime catgirls in the first place...
 

Cyan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
192
Say for example I'm writing a neo-noir. If in the end of the novel it's revealed that the murderer is in fact a psycho schoolgirl who has very long blue twintails and has heterochromia, is there any way for the reader to still be able to take the book seriously?
Put an anime girl on the cover so the reader knows what to expect going in, and you're probably fine. The key to this sort of thing is often just setting expectations appropriately.
 

Cyan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
192
Isn't the cover decided by the publisher? At least on first books.
Oh, I was thinking self-pubbed for whatever reason. Yeah, you're right. If you're looking for traditional publishing then cover, marketing, etc are not up to you and you'll have to establish expectations through text. I don't really know the best way to do that for this sort of thing. Typically you want to establish what the tone and world are going to be like on the first page-ish. First paragraph for a short story.
 

NoirSuede

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
414
Oh, I was thinking self-pubbed for whatever reason. Yeah, you're right. If you're looking for traditional publishing then cover, marketing, etc are not up to you and you'll have to establish expectations through text. I don't really know the best way to do that for this sort of thing. Typically you want to establish what the tone and world are going to be like on the first page-ish. First paragraph for a short story.
Speaking of expectations, since anime tropes like Tsunderes and Defeat Means Friendships are rare in western literature, how do you think would they be received in the west?
 

Shoeless

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,000
Isn't the cover decided by the publisher? At least on first books.

Cover is pretty much ALWAYS decided by the publisher. If they're nice, they'll ask your opinion on what you think the cover should have, the tone, the mood, all that stuff, and they might even loop you in on the artist or photographer they're getting to do the cover, but while they'll show you the final art and ask you what you think, even if you don't like it, they still ultimately have final say what goes on that cover. Unless you become extraordinarily huge, and you're very adamant with your agent that cover approval is something you have in your contract, or no book, the publisher showing you the cover and asking what you think is only a courtesy, not a requirement.
 

Rivenblade

Member
Nov 1, 2017
37,125
Still need to get through Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith. It's been on my shelf for around ten years.
 

Cyan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
192
Speaking of expectations, since anime tropes like Tsunderes and Defeat Means Friendships are rare in western literature, how do you think would they be received in the west?
One of the things tropes let you do is kind of shorthand things a bit. Like, if readers are already familiar with the idea of the detective gathering all the suspects in one place and explaining who the murderer is, you don't need to explain why it's happening or justify it, you just get on with things and do the reveal.

So there are two ways of doing this, and it really depends on your target audience. If you're going for an audience that's already familiar with these tropes, just go ahead and use them and don't worry about it. If you're figuring many or most of your readers won't be familiar with these tropes, then you need to do more to set them up and justify them in your setting. Like, why are these characters this way, why would the bad guy become friends after being defeated, why would the good guys accept it, that sort of thing.
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,379
So I've been reading through my first complete novel for the hell of it. I don't intend on doing anything with it, but I'm about to start another novel and figured I should read through one of my two completed novels from start to finish just for the hell of it. And it's been fun. My begining is fucking awful and rough and dull and overly dramatic, but once I get into the meat of it, I keep smiling at all the weird little things my characters do. Always a nice feeling when you forget you're reading your own rough draft and just think "Man, this book is silly and fun."
 

Xagarath

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,140
North-East England
Still need to get through Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith. It's been on my shelf for around ten years.
It's a fascinatingly odd - and very imaginative - collection of stories, though his novels are mssing from my copy. I need to try and track them down separately at somepoint.

You get spacefaring cat-people in Fritz Leiber, as well, though it really wasn't his best work.
 
Dec 14, 2017
1,314
Anyone who hasn't already really ought to read King's On Writing.
It's pretty bad advice, though. For instance, like King, I can feel my way through a compelling plot with adequate pacing. One of my critique partners has amazing line-to-line skills, but couldn't find a plot with two hands and a flashlight. King's advice on plotting is total shit for him.

And adverbs: You need to know the why for the adverb rule or you'll just have vague writing sans adverbs.
 

larrybud

Member
Oct 25, 2017
716
decided to start writing everyday. even if it's just a paragraph or two. at a low point in my life now, and writing is helping me keep some sense of equilibrium. the idea is a collection of short stories. the writing is at times forced, indulgent, barely worth the paper I'm printing it on.

but I don't care. I will work on it until the collection is finished.
 

Deleted member 3815

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,633


7 is my biggest rule as I write stories that I want to tell rather than what someone wants to tell, which is why I didn't agree with my dad when he told me that I should write a story about a character who is deaf or something about deafness as I wasn't something that I was interested in doing as yeah I am deaf, it doesn't define me nor did I want to create a character who is deaf if I didn't have a good story to go with it.

That was in 2013 and it's only recently did I finally create a deaf character but only because I had an interesting story that I wanted to tell, to go with it.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
not happy with the final thought but the rough draft of book 4 if finally done. clocks in at 222492 words (not bad for an arc that was originally planned to be 20-30k lol) 43 of my 84 total chapters to my story are in it lol.

Given that the books are merely end of arc points and the next book picks up a few hours after book 4 ends it's not a huge deal that I don't have an exciting thought to end it on. but it still feels nice to officially be moving on to book 6 (book 4 is going to need to be split into two books, I have a good point for that but haven't done that yet lol, thus the jump to 6 as my books are aiming to be 70-100k words long)

Part of me feels like I have earned a break (I've been doing at least 900 words a day since oct 1st of last year without a single miss) but another part of me is like, meh it's not that hard to keep going so just do it lol.

oh well, I still need to figure out how I am going to resolve saturday. My daily word goal is mostly so I get at least 7k words written a week.... so logically if I am busy from 6am until 11pm on saturday and can't do it before going to bed on friday I will just need to double up words on another day... but it will be a little sad to lose my daily streak...

my current plan is to double up on thursday and hope that I can still get my word count on saturday somehow even if I have to type it on my phone lol.
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,379
Finished reading through my first novel I ever wrote. It was both very boring and very exciting. A lot of dumb parts I forgot about, like how one of the characters is a balloon with a face, or how everyone kind of thinks Toshiki, the leader of their cult, is secretly kind of full of shit. Now that I've read through it, I guess its time to try and start writing another novel, one I've talked about before: a victorian era romance staring a velociraptor. I'll be honest, I'm kinda nervous cause novels are super out of my comfort zone. Still, I'm hoping I'll at least have fun.
 

SOLDIER

One Winged Slayer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
11,339
Apologies if this is a bit off-topic, I just thought perhaps some folks here would be able to give me some information.

My goal this year has been to narrow down what I want to do with a longterm career path. The more I've heavily thought about it, the more I've been realizing that what I would really want is some sort of professional writing job. I don't mean "Award Winning Journalist" or anything that foolish, but any kind of realistically obtainable job where I'm writing columns, articles, tech manuals...anything as long as it involves writing, because that's the one skill I feel reasonably confident that I could do well, plus I do have several years worth of experience I could share as a portfolio. It's mostly articles about videogames, but I'd like to think that companies would care more about my style of writing rather than the subject matter.

In any event, I was wondering if anyone was knowledgable about the kinds of jobs I should be searching for on the subject. A lot of writer jobs I see are of the part-time freelance variety. I prefer something that I can either focus on full-time, or perhaps two jobs or so that I could juggle. I'm utterly tired of my current job, so more than anything I'd like an alternative where I'm making equal pay or more, except it would be doing something I would potentially enjoy more. As an added bonus, it might help motivate me to take up creative writing again and finally try writing one of several dream novels I've wanted to do for ages.

If you feel this is too off-topic you can reply by PM, but just having a few searchable job titles would suffice (technical writer, copywriter, any kind of journalist job that doesn't require a degree or extensive knowledge of a particular subject, etc).
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Apologies if this is a bit off-topic, I just thought perhaps some folks here would be able to give me some information.

My goal this year has been to narrow down what I want to do with a longterm career path. The more I've heavily thought about it, the more I've been realizing that what I would really want is some sort of professional writing job. I don't mean "Award Winning Journalist" or anything that foolish, but any kind of realistically obtainable job where I'm writing columns, articles, tech manuals...anything as long as it involves writing, because that's the one skill I feel reasonably confident that I could do well, plus I do have several years worth of experience I could share as a portfolio. It's mostly articles about videogames, but I'd like to think that companies would care more about my style of writing rather than the subject matter.

In any event, I was wondering if anyone was knowledgable about the kinds of jobs I should be searching for on the subject. A lot of writer jobs I see are of the part-time freelance variety. I prefer something that I can either focus on full-time, or perhaps two jobs or so that I could juggle. I'm utterly tired of my current job, so more than anything I'd like an alternative where I'm making equal pay or more, except it would be doing something I would potentially enjoy more. As an added bonus, it might help motivate me to take up creative writing again and finally try writing one of several dream novels I've wanted to do for ages.

If you feel this is too off-topic you can reply by PM, but just having a few searchable job titles would suffice (technical writer, copywriter, any kind of journalist job that doesn't require a degree or extensive knowledge of a particular subject, etc).
I don't know a ton of the writing job market but as far as I know in the age of social media/internet with newspapers dying and companies able to pay freelance writers peanuts per story there aren't that many dedicated writing jobs out there so trying to get one would likely be hard unless you work your way up through freelance work and get a bit lucky.

As far as I know, the best route to go if you really want writing as part of your work is to pick up some foreign languages and do translation work.

From what some people have said creative writing wise you might want to do romance and fiction focusing on treating D&D as an actual thing (the characters level and what not) as those tend to be the stronger selling markets right now.

but again, the writing job market isn't something I have heavily looked into, just know that most of the people I talk to would love a job writing and most of them don't have one :/
 

Deleted member 3815

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,633
I stopped caring how neat it looks and just been writing whatever comes to my head.

Same, I think it was around chapter 8 or 9 when I stop hitting enter key so now it's all one long paragraph and the only I press the enter key is when I am doing the next chapter.

I kinda like doing it like that.

it's so hard to do this (without alcohol)

It is hard but it can be done without alcohol, it just takes a lot of effort and just accept that it's crap and will be improved in the editing process.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Same, I think it was around chapter 8 or 9 when I stop hitting enter key so now it's all one long paragraph and the only I press the enter key is when I am doing the next chapter.

I kinda like doing it like that.



It is hard but it can be done without alcohol, it just takes a lot of effort and just accept that it's crap and will be improved in the editing process.
I don't think I could leave it as just one paragraph... I would see that when editing and go... nope.
giphy.gif


:P

for me I don't drink at all, but yeah you have to accept that whatever you write may be crap and that is alright. Some isn't. Some will be. It doesn't matter if it's crap or not until you get to editing.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Ha ha, though honestly I just feel sorry for my future test readers as they gonna have to read all that one big text.
man... I don't have any real test readers right now, but i couldn't do that to them. If I am going to give anything to a test reader it will have at least one pass through editing to clean up stuff and make sure things are formatted decently.
 

Shoeless

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,000
man... I don't have any real test readers right now, but i couldn't do that to them. If I am going to give anything to a test reader it will have at least one pass through editing to clean up stuff and make sure things are formatted decently.

I'd say it depends on the beta reader, and what the expectations are. Some beta readers are totally okay with a first draft that big chunks missing, spelling errors and improper formatting all over the place. Other beta readers won't touch a manuscript if it's in that state, and want something in "working condition" before they'll even look at it. Really all depends on the kinds of readers you know. Some guys I know won't even be able to give you any useful story/structure related critiques if there are mechanical errors, because they'll correct all those FIRST, and then, if you ask them, "So what'd you think of the story?" They'll respond, "I dunno, I haven't even looked at that part yet, you really need to learn when to indent your paragraphs." Other people completely ignore all the mechanical stuff and get straight to the heart of character/dialog/pacing problems. It really all depends on who your readers are.
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,379
I'd say it depends on the beta reader, and what the expectations are. Some beta readers are totally okay with a first draft that big chunks missing, spelling errors and improper formatting all over the place. Other beta readers won't touch a manuscript if it's in that state, and want something in "working condition" before they'll even look at it. Really all depends on the kinds of readers you know. Some guys I know won't even be able to give you any useful story/structure related critiques if there are mechanical errors, because they'll correct all those FIRST, and then, if you ask them, "So what'd you think of the story?" They'll respond, "I dunno, I haven't even looked at that part yet, you really need to learn when to indent your paragraphs." Other people completely ignore all the mechanical stuff and get straight to the heart of character/dialog/pacing problems. It really all depends on who your readers are.

Its more a personal thing for me where I try not to give betareaders a story that I don't at least have atleast a good first or second draft. Especially since I have a habit of completely rewriting a lot of my first drafts. If I'm not at least a little happy with reading my story in some way I won't have someone read it. Challenge stories not included.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Its more a personal thing for me where I try not to give betareaders a story that I don't at least have atleast a good first or second draft. Especially since I have a habit of completely rewriting a lot of my first drafts. If I'm not at least a little happy with reading my story in some way I won't have someone read it. Challenge stories not included.
kind of my thoughts, I mean... It would be nice if I had someone that didn't mind my sad rough draft to tell me if my ideas are working or not, but in general if I am going to have someone read this I want to get it to a state where I don't mind reading it first lol.

to be fair I am also asking a potential reader to be reading for a long ass time >.>
 

Shoeless

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,000
kind of my thoughts, I mean... It would be nice if I had someone that didn't mind my sad rough draft to tell me if my ideas are working or not, but in general if I am going to have someone read this I want to get it to a state where I don't mind reading it first lol.

to be fair I am also asking a potential reader to be reading for a long ass time >.>

Yeah, I know what you mean. I usually try to give a "complete" first draft of a story to readers. By that, I mean I've tried to at least properly format it, so spacing is correct, spelling is largely there, and there are no missing "chunks," with [insert action sequence here] it's all written. I find I get much better feedback when I've got as few barriers to comprehension as possible. But it's true, you ARE asking someone to take a big chunk of their time to read your story and help make it better. It's more considerate of you to try to make that as easy as possible for them.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Yeah, I know what you mean. I usually try to give a "complete" first draft of a story to readers. By that, I mean I've tried to at least properly format it, so spacing is correct, spelling is largely there, and there are no missing "chunks," with [insert action sequence here] it's all written. I find I get much better feedback when I've got as few barriers to comprehension as possible. But it's true, you ARE asking someone to take a big chunk of their time to read your story and help make it better. It's more considerate of you to try to make that as easy as possible for them.
well in my case I am potentially asking someone to read 450k words eventually with plans ultimately to get around 2mil so yeah... long ass time lol.

In other thoughts I am testing something if someone wants to play with it to make sure they can add their name

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZBxz97L-tg8FA8tncq7MN6BfjyAw4ouC02ClpRI8GyY/edit#gid=0 :P
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,379
In other news: I'm going to try using the website critique circle again just cause despite having the worst critique I've ever gotten on there. I lookedat it the other day and after his first inline comment my blood was boiling again.

kind of my thoughts, I mean... It would be nice if I had someone that didn't mind my sad rough draft to tell me if my ideas are working or not, but in general if I am going to have someone read this I want to get it to a state where I don't mind reading it first lol.

to be fair I am also asking a potential reader to be reading for a long ass time >.>

For you it might not be a bad idea to ask people to read like chapters or parts instead of a whole thing. I've seen people do that before to lure readers into being interested in the whole thing plus asking someone to read through a 5,000 word chapter might be a lot less daunting of a task for them than asking them to read through your giant ass series.

well in my case I am potentially asking someone to read 450k words eventually with plans ultimately to get around 2mil so yeah... long ass time lol.

In other thoughts I am testing something if someone wants to play with it to make sure they can add their name

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZBxz97L-tg8FA8tncq7MN6BfjyAw4ouC02ClpRI8GyY/edit#gid=0 :P

You have such a bad habbit of making links and not telling anyone what they are :P This (a table to keep track of word counts for the month of march btw) is a really neat idea. I already keep track of my word counts cause I do monthly writing goals so I might drop them in here if I remember it exists.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
In other news: I'm going to try using the website critique circle again just cause despite having the worst critique I've ever gotten on there. I lookedat it the other day and after his first inline comment my blood was boiling again.



For you it might not be a bad idea to ask people to read like chapters or parts instead of a whole thing. I've seen people do that before to lure readers into being interested in the whole thing plus asking someone to read through a 5,000 word chapter might be a lot less daunting of a task for them than asking them to read through your giant ass series.

my plan is indeed to just ask someone to read the first chapter at some point... and ideally get them interested in reading more (ideally about 1 chapter every 2 weeks or so)
not the whole thing... there is no way I can be motivated enough to get the whole thing edited for a beta reader before trying to hand some out :P

but alas I still need them in the long run as there are very few chapters that can be read without needing a lot of context from previous chapters.
 
Dec 14, 2017
1,314
In other news: I'm going to try using the website critique circle again just cause despite having the worst critique I've ever gotten on there. I lookedat it the other day and after his first inline comment my blood was boiling again.



For you it might not be a bad idea to ask people to read like chapters or parts instead of a whole thing. I've seen people do that before to lure readers into being interested in the whole thing plus asking someone to read through a 5,000 word chapter might be a lot less daunting of a task for them than asking them to read through your giant ass series.



You have such a bad habbit of making links and not telling anyone what they are :P This (a table to keep track of word counts for the month of march btw) is a really neat idea. I already keep track of my word counts cause I do monthly writing goals so I might drop them in here if I remember it exists.
I use Scribophile. It's helped my writing quite a lot, though I now also have a local critique group.
 

NameUser

Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,014
It's pretty bad advice, though. For instance, like King, I can feel my way through a compelling plot with adequate pacing. One of my critique partners has amazing line-to-line skills, but couldn't find a plot with two hands and a flashlight. King's advice on plotting is total shit for him.

And adverbs: You need to know the why for the adverb rule or you'll just have vague writing sans adverbs.
King is one of my favorites. I've burned through at least 40 of his novels, story collections, etc. But I don't follow his advice on plotting. Dude doesn't outline and you can tell. Some of his novels feel aimless for the first 100 pages, and don't get me started on his endings. He can get away with the slow starts, but new authors should hit the ground running. My only goal is to grab the reader by the collar (from the first page) and drag them down a rabbit hole.
 
Oct 29, 2017
5,298
Minnesota
King is one of my favorites. I've burned through at least 40 of his novels, story collections, etc. But I don't follow his advice on plotting. Dude doesn't outline and you can tell. Some of his novels feel aimless for the first 100 pages, and don't get me started on his endings. He can get away with the slow starts, but new authors should hit the ground running. My only goal is to grab the reader by the collar (from the first page) and drag them down a rabbit hole.
I think both of those problems are an issue in his editing and not writing style. My books start out pretty aimless, but I cut the aimless shit down heavily before I'm done. I have to feel the plot out, but I know readers don't want to know that.

Same kinda goes for the ending, though endings are hard and I kinda like King's whacky-af endings. They get shit on more than they deserve, IMO.
 

JaseMath

Member
Oct 27, 2017
9,384
Denver, CO
Question for anyone experienced enough with the process to answer.

I've finished my Beta draft, and am ready to deliver to my handful audience. My question is this: After taking in their feedback (which hopefully isn't catastrophic), what are the next steps? Query an agent? A professional edit?
 
Last edited:
Shoeless’ editing/proofing advice

Shoeless

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,000
Question for anyone experienced enough with the process to answer.

I've finished my Beta draft, and am ready to deliver to my handful audience. My question is this: After taking in their feedback (which hopefully isn't catastrophic), what are the next steps? Query an agent? A professional edit?

This depends entirely on what you're comfortable with. A professional editor can be a great idea if you find the right one, but that involves a lot of research and, of course, you need to have a budget in place for that. A quality editor will, at minimum, run you several hundred dollars, and that's just for a developmental/structural edit, which only looks at your story itself to help you with pacing/character/structural problems, and makes no attempt to actually edit the prose itself, or fix typos. For that kind of full-blooded edit/copy edit, that will run you even more if you don't have the confidence to do it yourself. Some writers will do this to give their book the best possible chance in the hands of a literary agent, other writers will do this because they're self-publishing, have the money on hand, and want to make sure their writing is as professional as possible before hitting the market.

But once you've gotten the beta reader comments back, I'd say read them, then sit on them and decide which ones really improve the book for the better. All of this is going to be pure opinion, so not all the beta comments are going to resonate with you. However, if you find that, say, you had 10 beta readers and 7 of them are pointing out a thing and saying it's problematic, you should definitely pay closer attention to that. If everyone's opinions are all over the place about different things, that's just individual taste at work. If lots of them are consistently getting hung up on something, that's a red flag to you that you've probably got something to fix.

Once you've made the changes, you should try to polish your book as much as possible. You absolutely don't have to pay for a copy or line-by-line edit at this stage, but try on your own to fix as many typos and grammar errors as you can spot. Grammar checker add-ons like Grammarly can help in this regard if you're willing to use the trial, or even just subscribe for a month, long enough to get the job done. When that's all finished, make sure your book adheres to all the standard manuscript submission format conventions, like being double-spaced, 12 point in a font like Times Roman or Courier, all that good stuff. Then take a good long time to work up a good query letter, which, to me personally, I found harder to do than writing the damn book. When you've got a query letter, start looking up the agents that represent your genre, compile your list, or just use some service like QueryTracker to help, and then... welcome to the Query Trenches. You're now slogging it out with thousands of other people trying to get the attention of a literary agent who will, if you're lucky, offer representation, then be your advocate, getting editors to look at your book and trying to convince those editors to give you a deal.

That's the conventional way to do it. Although the agent hunt these days has a lot of different options, like Twitter pitches directly to agents, going to SFF conventions and pitching to agents in person, or even new activities like "Pitch Wars" where hopeful new writers enter a contest to have their novel considered by established writers who then act as mentors, polishing up the novels, and then bringing them to literary agents to consider. There are a lot of ways to go about these days.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Question for anyone experienced enough with the process to answer.

I've finished my Beta draft, and am ready to deliver to my handful audience. My question is this: After taking in their feedback (which hopefully isn't catastrophic), what are the next steps? Query an agent? A professional edit?
my much shorter answer.

if you figure out something is broken... fix it then worry about other steps :P

but yeah professional edits aren't cheap. the one I was looking at is
7tfGAWq.png


I'm sure cheaper stuff is around, this is just one that specializes in editing stuff in a light novel (japanese) format :P
but again cheaper might not be actually cheaper... a cheap but bad edit is worth almost nothing.
 

Deleted member 3815

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,633
Science should come up with a device that people can wear and they can mentally type out their book while they are sleeping, come on science get on it.

I am ill and everything hurst.
 

JaseMath

Member
Oct 27, 2017
9,384
Denver, CO
This depends entirely on what you're comfortable with. A professional editor can be a great idea if you find the right one, but that involves a lot of research and, of course, you need to have a budget in place for that. A quality editor will, at minimum, run you several hundred dollars, and that's just for a developmental/structural edit, which only looks at your story itself to help you with pacing/character/structural problems, and makes no attempt to actually edit the prose itself, or fix typos. For that kind of full-blooded edit/copy edit, that will run you even more if you don't have the confidence to do it yourself. Some writers will do this to give their book the best possible chance in the hands of a literary agent, other writers will do this because they're self-publishing, have the money on hand, and want to make sure their writing is as professional as possible before hitting the market.

But once you've gotten the beta reader comments back, I'd say read them, then sit on them and decide which ones really improve the book for the better. All of this is going to be pure opinion, so not all the beta comments are going to resonate with you. However, if you find that, say, you had 10 beta readers and 7 of them are pointing out a thing and saying it's problematic, you should definitely pay closer attention to that. If everyone's opinions are all over the place about different things, that's just individual taste at work. If lots of them are consistently getting hung up on something, that's a red flag to you that you've probably got something to fix.

Once you've made the changes, you should try to polish your book as much as possible. You absolutely don't have to pay for a copy or line-by-line edit at this stage, but try on your own to fix as many typos and grammar errors as you can spot. Grammar checker add-ons like Grammarly can help in this regard if you're willing to use the trial, or even just subscribe for a month, long enough to get the job done. When that's all finished, make sure your book adheres to all the standard manuscript submission format conventions, like being double-spaced, 12 point in a font like Times Roman or Courier, all that good stuff. Then take a good long time to work up a good query letter, which, to me personally, I found harder to do than writing the damn book. When you've got a query letter, start looking up the agents that represent your genre, compile your list, or just use some service like QueryTracker to help, and then... welcome to the Query Trenches. You're now slogging it out with thousands of other people trying to get the attention of a literary agent who will, if you're lucky, offer representation, then be your advocate, getting editors to look at your book and trying to convince those editors to give you a deal.

That's the conventional way to do it. Although the agent hunt these days has a lot of different options, like Twitter pitches directly to agents, going to SFF conventions and pitching to agents in person, or even new activities like "Pitch Wars" where hopeful new writers enter a contest to have their novel considered by established writers who then act as mentors, polishing up the novels, and then bringing them to literary agents to consider. There are a lot of ways to go about these days.
This is a very thorough, very helpful response—thank you. I'm reasonably confident in my own editing skills and have gone through my work as judiciously as possible, but, of course, being so close to it for so long, I've likely missed a lot more than I thought. One of my beta's is an English Lit major who edits on the side. She's been kind enough to help and has offered to help following her read-through, but I'm very open to content editing.

As for querying an agent, I've heard stories about that part, none of them easy. I don't love the idea of begging over social media, so I'll probably opt for more conventional channels and see where that gets me. Fingers crossed (like so many others).

Again, thanks for the advice!

my much shorter answer.

if you figure out something is broken... fix it then worry about other steps :P

but yeah professional edits aren't cheap. the one I was looking at is
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I'm sure cheaper stuff is around, this is just one that specializes in editing stuff in a light novel (japanese) format :P
but again cheaper might not be actually cheaper... a cheap but bad edit is worth almost nothing.
Thanks!
 

Shoeless

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,000
As for querying an agent, I've heard stories about that part, none of them easy. I don't love the idea of begging over social media, so I'll probably opt for more conventional channels and see where that gets me. Fingers crossed (like so many others)

Good luck on your novel. And yeah, the old fashioned, conventional way still works. I got my agent just by querying. Didn't even have a Twitter account until she told me I had to get one for marketing purposes in the future, so don't think that you have to be the social media life-of-the-party to get somewhere. The publishing industry is one of the few areas where your own skill--and a little luck with having the right story at the right time in front of the right eyes--is all you need to get somewhere. You don't have to know someone in this industry to get ahead.
 

Xagarath

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,140
North-East England
T
As for querying an agent, I've heard stories about that part, none of them easy. I don't love the idea of begging over social media, so I'll probably opt for more conventional channels and see where that gets me. Fingers crossed (like so many others).
I've only had rejections (though some of them pretty complimentary) from agent querying, and wound up going straight to small publishers instead, but one of my writer friends got an agent the old-fashioned way and is now in negotiations with major publishers.
It still works the conventional way, as long as you can take the form rejections and long patches of silence (and you will get plenty of both).
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
I'm thinking about throwing together a little writing competition for next month... WITH PRIZES (mostly for pc gamers :P)

The goal for people would be to make it to 25k words next month. You can count what ever you want, editing, multiple short stories, all one story, poetry competitions, creative writing challenges ect. Just aim for 25k worth of words across everything that you don't have to do (aka try to refrain from including stuff like school papers or work :P)

I will have a sheet set up where you can import your numbers, so we can keep track of each other and see how it's going.
anyone that gets to 25k words gets to get a game from a list of games I will provide (mostly steam keys, some other keys for consoles as well)
anyone that gets more words than me will get to pick two games.
and picking order will be from the person with the most words down to the least.

I will likely polish stuff up, but that is the general idea.

a little tease of potential prizes... (through about 20% of my humble bundle stuff including only games I think someone might want)
A Kiss For the Petals - Remembering How We Met
Alien: Isolation
Back to Bed
Blockstorm
Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition
Chime Sharp
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Chronology
ClusterPuck 99
Cosmonautica
Dead Rising 2
Deep Dungeons of Doom
Defend Your Life: TD
Devil Daggers
Dimension Jump
Dreaming Sarah
eden*
Fault milestone one
Fault milestone two side:above
Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location
FreeCell Quest
Furi
Garry's Mod
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
Grey Goo Definitive Edition
Gunpoint
Guns of Icarus Alliance
H1Z1
Hand of Fate
Headlander
Higurashi When They Cry Hou
Human: Fall Flat
If My Heart Had Wings
Infested Planet
Lakeview Cabin Collection
LostWinds
Master Spy
Mimic Arena
Mr. Shifty
Offensive Combat: Redux!
On Rusty Trails
Passpartout: The Starving Artist
Pony Island
Psychonauts
Punch Club
Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition
ReThink
Sanctum 2
Scanner Sombre
Scrap Garden
Seasons After Fall
Sid Meier's Civilization® VI
SimplePlanes
STRAFE: Millennium Edition
Team Racing League
Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
Teslagrad
The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited
The Fall
The Inner World
The Norwood Suite
Train Valley
Wargame: Red Dragon
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III
World to the West

I am trying to gauge some interest before going more full blown with this :P
 

Deleted member 4532

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
5,936
I'm thinking about throwing together a little writing competition for next month... WITH PRIZES (mostly for pc gamers :P)

The goal for people would be to make it to 25k words next month. You can count what ever you want, editing, multiple short stories, all one story, poetry competitions, creative writing challenges ect. Just aim for 25k worth of words across everything that you don't have to do (aka try to refrain from including stuff like school papers or work :P)

I will have a sheet set up where you can import your numbers, so we can keep track of each other and see how it's going.
anyone that gets to 25k words gets to get a game from a list of games I will provide (mostly steam keys, some other keys for consoles as well)
anyone that gets more words than me will get to pick two games.
and picking order will be from the person with the most words down to the least.

I will likely polish stuff up, but that is the general idea.

a little tease of potential prizes... (through about 20% of my humble bundle stuff including only games I think someone might want)
A Kiss For the Petals - Remembering How We Met
Alien: Isolation
Back to Bed
Blockstorm
Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition
Chime Sharp
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Chronology
ClusterPuck 99
Cosmonautica
Dead Rising 2
Deep Dungeons of Doom
Defend Your Life: TD
Devil Daggers
Dimension Jump
Dreaming Sarah
eden*
Fault milestone one
Fault milestone two side:above
Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location
FreeCell Quest
Furi
Garry's Mod
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
Grey Goo Definitive Edition
Gunpoint
Guns of Icarus Alliance
H1Z1
Hand of Fate
Headlander
Higurashi When They Cry Hou
Human: Fall Flat
If My Heart Had Wings
Infested Planet
Lakeview Cabin Collection
LostWinds
Master Spy
Mimic Arena
Mr. Shifty
Offensive Combat: Redux!
On Rusty Trails
Passpartout: The Starving Artist
Pony Island
Psychonauts
Punch Club
Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition
ReThink
Sanctum 2
Scanner Sombre
Scrap Garden
Seasons After Fall
Sid Meier's Civilization® VI
SimplePlanes
STRAFE: Millennium Edition
Team Racing League
Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
Teslagrad
The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited
The Fall
The Inner World
The Norwood Suite
Train Valley
Wargame: Red Dragon
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III
World to the West

I am trying to gauge some interest before going more full blown with this :P
Hmmm, I think I'll be down. Not for the computer games as I don't like gaming on my PC but just to see if I could do it, ya know. This month I have around 9,000 words which is kinda disappointing lol. I need to do more of this.
 

zulux21

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,370
Hmmm, I think I'll be down. Not for the computer games as I don't like gaming on my PC but just to see if I could do it, ya know. This month I have around 9,000 words which is kinda disappointing lol. I need to do more of this.
i'm mostly trying to motivate others. I wish i had a wider array of things I could give away, but most of them happen to be PC games.
Though I do have some 3ds, wiiu and I think ps3 games as well :P

I enjoy motivating people, as it gives my writing some meaning. Which helps since I am unlikely to ever publish anything lol.