Manuscript Editing and Its Four Stages to Complete Your Book
If you are a novice writer, you would soon realize that you do not send your manuscript to the major publishers without it properly undergoing the manuscript editing process. Manuscript editing is the middle part of the book writing trilogy beginning with writing and ending with printing. Your book will never be lifted off the shelves if it gets reviews that the way it is written sucks so better make sure that it has been completely scanned by a professional manuscript editor.
The manuscript editing process is performed by one person or a group of people with the intent of ensuring that the manuscript, before submitted is screened and the errors threshed out. The first part of the manuscript editing process is the heavier one among the other chores because the one who is tasked to do this has to take a look into the pace the storyline runs, the motives and subplots in the story, the development and introduction of characters (where many writers, especially those who are running on a deadline) miss out on properly introducing their cast of characters and if unchecked and unedited, there will be personalities in a certain book the origins of which are unknown, and the whole organization and structure of the manuscript premise.
This manuscript editor will be suggesting a lot of revisions and amendments on your storyline and you just have to be patient since these guys are experts and many of them have seen a lot of unsuccessful writers because of stubbornness.
After the major editing has been done, a full paragraph here, an insert in a chapter there, what comes next would be continuity editing. The task of this editor is to focus on the characters and their relevance with the settings. They make sure that if you mentioned a specific attribute at the onset, the description of that attribute is maintained all throughout the whole book. You would not want your character to have a broken arm in the first chapter and then plating baseball in the same chapter. To look out for the inconsistencies is the job of the second editor.
The third stage deals with a word per word review if the whole manuscript, this time checking on the grammar, spelling, and the correct punctuations. If you are watching the editors as they work, you would most likely be surprised that at this point, you would still see some errors even after the whole manuscript has been subjected to two editing procedures already.
The fourth and final stage is all about trying to catch what the first three stages missed. So after realizing the tedious job that editors have to do to make sure that what will be submitted is almost error free, it is now high time to hire one for you.
