Well, I saw that post on Facebook the other day. First it made me smile, then it made me think.
I wondered how many times did I actually read my book between jotting down the first notes and the final version the editor eventually handed back to my publisher? I have no idea, but 75 times don’t seem unlikely. I’m not sure how other writers work, but every finished scene got transferred to my Kindle for proofreading at the next day. I marked all typos, story holes, everything I thought needed more work. That’s lunchbreak for you. And of an evening I sat, read, corrected, rewrote. I rewrote quite a bit, scrapped scenes, wrote new ones, stretched my time line from 6 weeks to six months because of plausibility.
I still can’t tell the several forms apart and frankly, I don’t really care if it is a line edit or proof read or something else entirely. I just know that I went over every page and every scene and every word so many times that in the end I didn’t like my book very much. So I let it rest for a few weeks before reading it again. Then I sent it out to people around me for another proofread, check on locations, check on character building etc. And then sat with everyone of my test readers to work through the manuscript before sending it off.
And after that the professional edit the my editor. So I read a lot of it again. Thinking about it, 75 times is probably not anywhere near enough.
But at least in the end I liked my book again.
For those interested, the book in question is called “Träume und Traumfrauen” and written in German and published under Diana S. Wirtz.
Available here:
DS Porton Books 