Editors used to work for publishers. Their job was making sure books sell, meaning books meet reader expectations. Old-school editors are Genre editors.
It doesn’t matter whether you want to self-publish or get your book published through a publishing house, your manuscript needs to shine. Otherwise, agents and publishers will reject it or readers won’t recommend it. You need to hire editors in both cases.
Nowadays, in the era of self-publishing, most editors work for writers, not publishers. And writers have more editing needs. For that reason, we developed the Eight Crafts Holistic Objective Editing Service, ECHOES. We offer objective editing services for story development, all eight writing crafts, and even sub-crafts, for example, narrative frame, deep POV, down to revising the Prose of important story moments.
Feedback
Even successful writers have their manuscripts checked. Why? For the same reason, Olympic gold medalists need coaches. Even those on top of their game need feedback. Writers need feedback on whether the images in their heads really made it onto the page or whether readers will read something else into it.
Writers face a tough challenge: the challenge of delayed feedback. If you don’t engage editors and beta readers, you will get feedback from your readers after you publish your book, sometimes months after.
Engaging editors does the trick, but you will face the following challenges:
Objectivity
Editors who don’t follow a writing methodology will struggle to give objective feedback, or, if they do, struggle to communicate their feedback objectively.
Granularity
Often, editing services are not granular enough, meaning editors want to read your entire manuscript before giving you feedback. That works for reviewing story outlines, but not for reviewing things like a narrative frame, a characterization, the story engine, and the world power system.
Pre-writing Feedback
Many editors don’t help with the authoring phase (see all phases below).
Writers are used to engaging editors some time into the writing phase. “The first draft of anything is shit,” said Ernest Hemingway and we all know he was right. Hence, we are always tempted to get our prose to a presentable level before submitting it to a developmental editor. The thing is, developmental editors only assess our story’s outline and not our prose. If something is wrong with story outline, we may end up trashing pages of polished prose.
The Eight Crafts Holistic Objective Editing Service, ECHOES, addresses all three editorial issues. We offer objective editing services for story authoring stories , story structure, and prose. In addition, we can review story elements as granular as it gets, for example, a big idea, a narrative frame, deep POV, even all the way down to the prose of important scene elements. And we don’t mind reviewing your manuscript while your prose is still lacking.
The Writing Phases and Editing Services
Eight Crafts maps the authoring and writing process as follows:
The Conception Phase
A book wants to be written and the muse gets the writer pregnant. How should you proceed when the muse strikes and inspires you to write a story? We conceive inspirations as fragments, or rather puzzle pieces, for example, an interesting what-if, the image of a quirky character, a cool inciting incident, a mind-blowing scene, or a dialogue fragment. Why don’t you capture those inspirations in a mind map? You can use the Eight Crafts Story Mind Map for that.
For the conception phase, Eight Crafts offers the following editing services (not limited to):
- Review of the story mind map
- Review of the story engine
- Review of your answers to the Eight Crafts story questions
- Review of your story synopsis
We have templates for each editing product available, which make reviews cost-effective for you.
The Contextual Phase
The purpose of the contextual phase is to find the pieces that have been missing in the mind map to complete your story engine. For example, if you already have a crushing adversity, a cool inciting incident, a rootable protagonist, and a key ability, you still need to come up with the antagonist and climax.
While the first inspirations for your story came effortless and uninvited, getting the missing pieces from the muse can be tedious.
We can help you complete your story engine and find the missing pieces.
The Outlining Phase
The purpose of the outlining phase is to turn the story engine and mind map into a set of fifty to sixty scenes and 75,000 to 85,000 words to write – the scope of an average novel.
We can review your story outline according to multiple methodologies, for example, the Eight Crafts Story Outline or the Hero’s Journey.
The Creative writing Phase
Now, you can sit at your laptop and bleed your fifty to sixty scenes. Don’t worry about the craft and editing at this point. Put on your artist cap and let the muse or genius write through you.
The Editing and Rewriting Phase
The Editing & Rewriting Phase is a phase of alternating editorial analysis and rewriting.
The rhythm of analysis and re-writing is important, don’t try to do both at the same time. Put on your editor cap, analyze your scenes, and make editorial notes. When you’re done with self-editing, put on your writer cap and re-write.
For the editing/rewriting phase, we offer the following editing services (not limited to):
- Review of your story’s big idea
- Verification of whether your story meets the expectations of the chosen genre(s)
- Verification of your story engine and your story outline (aka developmental editing)
- Verification of your narrative frame
- Finding POV errors
- Finding illogicals (aka copy editing)
- Review of characterizations
- Review of your story world
- Review of scene structure – all or just important scenes
- Review of dialogues
- Review of your prose (aka line-by-line editing)
Production Phase
For the production phase, we can help you with proofreading.
For a detailed view of the authoring and writing phases and a detailed manuscript revision management system, grab a free copy of the advanced reader copy The Eight Crafts Revision Management.
Or give us a shout, even if you don’t know exactly what you need:
