What republishing Dance Noir taught me about editing a novel

I launched Dance Noir one year ago today. I’ve received great reviews; it currently rates 4.8 stars out of 5. Even so, I just republished the book with an updated version. The story itself remains unchanged, but I had received feedback about a few typographical errors, so down the rabbit hole we go.

I may have mentioned previously that editing is the real work. Well, this blog’s about that editing, but what’s a comma between friends? There is an old joke on a “T” shirt that goes like this: 

“I like to cook pets and friends! 

Punctuation saves lives!”

You see, there is a big difference between that statement and this version, salted with a few commas; 

“I like to cook, pets, and friends!”

I’d like to think I’m growing as a writer and begrudgingly an editor. I first wrote my short story Beach Combers somewhat as a lark. The process taught me how to publish an eBook on Kindle. I think that really got me started and encouraged me to move on to bigger and better things. I found out that Kindle publishing tools were free and pretty easy to learn. 

Dance Noir expanded that learning experience to publishing a paperback. With a much larger manuscript came more editing, proofreading, and back-cover design. I used AI to assist with editing, not to make changes but to identify potential issues. I ran multiple edit passes myself, plus had beta readers and ARC readers go through the manuscript in detail. It felt pretty clean.

So why not just hire an editor? 

Good question. Let’s see: as an independent author, I make a small percentage of the book sale as royalties, and since I don’t have an agent or a following (yet), I will be lucky to sell 100 copies. If I paid one or more editors to edit (there are multiple types of editors), someone else to typeset, someone for the cover art, and perhaps someone else for the chapter art, I could easily spend $10,000 to $15,000, and I might make about $300.”

So that math doesn’t work. At least not at this point in my writing; it just doesn’t make economic sense. Everyone except the author makes money, and it doesn’t matter whether the book sells. Oh, the marketing people want to sell me their services too.

One of the best pieces of advice I received along the way was to learn to edit myself, so I set to it. While working on The Privateers of the Dauntless, I learned to create a style sheet and use it to build an AI prompt that analyzes the manuscript for all kinds of editing issues. That prompt is now seventeen pages long and has been executed against the manuscript fifteen to twenty times, plus personal readings and an oral reading. AI can miss things. I have no doubt that there are still minor issues in the manuscript, but human editors miss things too. 

AI is exceptionally useful for repetitive, systematic auditing against a detailed style sheet: names, capitalization, chronology, terminology, continuity, character descriptions, etc., while humans remain much better at experiencing the book as readers. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for a human reader/editor to notice a change from the first 20,000 words to the last 10,000 of an 87,000-word manuscript, but AI has no problem remembering and tracking such issues.

Mind you, I never let AI rewrite the manuscript. That’s not its job, and doing so could change my voice. The AI only identifies and flags issues for me to review and resolve. Sometimes they are false positives that are intentional on my part. A slang word or nautical term, for example, but I can add these intentional exceptions to the style sheet and editing prompt so that AI will not flag them in future reviews. 

All in all, it gets pretty detailed and thorough, but the final check is the beta readers. Friendly readers who haven’t been involved in writing the story and can read it with fresh eyes and no preconceptions. They can report to me any issues that are confusing or unclear. If they trip over a typo or misspelled word, that’s good too, but hopefully those have all been sifted out by now.

I put all that extensive editing work into the Privateers of the Dauntless, and it is out to my beta readers now. So far, so good, but I’m eagerly waiting for them to finish reading and report their findings to me.

That’s a long way around from the initial discussion about Dance Noir, and me republishing it today, 1 year after the initial release.

With this hard-earned knowledge on editing, I began building the style sheet and AI editing prompt for the next Nick Gazelle Investigation book, Tattooed Canary. This necessarily had to account for the first book in the series, Dance Noir, to keep the character names, timeline, voice, and such in sync. After creating the style sheet and AI prompt, I realized I should probably run a fresh edit pass on Dance Noir to see if the AI edit process I developed would find any of the issues I was hearing about. 

It did. It found 102 errors in the 27,000-word manuscript. That seems like a lot, but honestly, only eight of them would be noticeable to a casual reader. A few name drifts (spelling), and a couple of words were the right sounding word but the wrong spelling for the context. The rest were mostly various punctuation and capitalization issues, mostly involving the infamous comma. Still, corrections had to be made. 

…to put it all in perspective, it was a rate of about 0.03% on the notable errors, he seemed to say, to comfort himself.

See what I did there? I brought it all the way around to punctuation saves lives, mostly commas in this case. But these were all very technical usages, mostly around speaker tags. Whether the quote ends with a comma and the next word is lowercase, or it ends with a period and the next word is capitalized:

“You learned that in your English class,” he said. 

You see the quote ended with a comma because it was followed by the speaker tag ‘he said,’ and the ‘he’ is not capitalized, unless it was a proper noun or ‘I’. OK, but what if I don’t use a direct speaker tag and instead use an action beat like: 

“You learned that in English.” Tom opened the door and looked her in the eye.

In that case, the dialogue ends with a period because what follows is an action beat rather than a speaker tag. The action beat is a new sentence, so the first word is capitalized.

Did you get all that…

Yeah, you knew all that I know…

Well, as I said at the beginning, I think I’m really growing as a writer. Thus, I hope Privateers of the Dauntless is better than Dance Noir, although I just fixed all that, and I think Tattooed Canary will be even better. 

Enjoy the read…