Madness Editing (1st Round) Complete!

Madness Editing (1st Round) Complete!

Holy damn, I’m finally finished with the first round of editing. It’s terrifying to think that I’ll need to go through it all again in two months, but this round is the most work, so it’s all downhill from here.

Most people will tell you that you should pretty much always reduce your word count during editing – unless you end up doing some major re-writing like adding in new characters or entirely new scenes. This is primarily due to the fact that while you’re writing, you’re really just plugging away in the moment and you add a lot of redundant and unnecessary text. These get trimmed during editing, hopefully, resulting in a much cleaner manuscript. Here’s a bit of a breakdown for both Honor and Madness.

Honor – First Draft: ~121,000 words
Honor – Published: ~113,000 words
— Trimmed: ~8,000 (6.6%)

Madness – First Draft: 136,427 words
Madness – Post-Editing (Round 1): 131,704
— Trimmed: 4,723 (3.5%)

To be honest, I didn’t think I would remove more than maybe 1,000 – 2,000 words. However, I was pretty surprised that I managed to clean up nearly 5,000. As you can see, a smaller percentage got trimmed compared to Honor, however I’ll take that as a good sign. It was definitely obvious during editing that my writing has improved since I wrote Honor.

My next step is to touch up a few minor things and work on formatting the document. After formatting, I can upload it to Amazon and then get the sizing specifications for the cover art and start adjusting that. From there, I’ll be able to get ARCs (Advance Review Copies), which I’ll be sending to a few Beta Readers for feedback.

Overall, I’m really excited to have this book in hand. Between the badass cover art and the much more compelling story (in my slightly unbiased opinion), I think Madness blows Honor out of the water by a longshot. But, it’ll be good to get feedback from some other readers.

We’ll see how that goes. 🙂