On Self Editing

Still chewing through editing and corrections, but I'm in the home stretch. Now, I'm absolutely certain that I'm going down the wrong road doing all the editing myself, but what editing talent I've managed to talk out of other people have given me turnaround times that are far in excess of what I feel comfortable with for this first release. So, I've put my QA hat on from times past, and gone through everything myself. I'm almost done with this pass, which I think I will dub the final pass.

I did have the benefit of the ratings in this particular instance, to weed out what chapters need the most work, but still this has taken me a little longer than I thought it might. I am, however, quite satisfied that I was able to weed out some gross continuity errors, as well as awkward wording. I have to trust in my own innate grammatical eye to catch any technical errors.

A little backstory on Scoundrel's Answer: I wrote this in basically two stretches, separated by almost six months. It was initially released in serial form, and during those six months I didn't work on it, I churned out another little book released under a different name elsewhere. This gap in work, however, left a lot of little details between the two halves of the book mismatched.

The second half received better ratings overall than the first, so I have to assume that knocking out that little novel in November and the lessons learned from its editing and rewrite taught me a few things. The bulk of the work in fixing Scoundrel's Answer has therefore been in patching up the first half to fall more in line with the second. I think I have succeeded on this, but I won't know for sure.

I would love more sets of eyes on my future releases to give me more specific feedback about what works and what doesn't, and I think in the future, I'll go the extra mile to do so. However, for now, has anyone else had success with just a self review and editing pass?

On another note, I've started a short called The Duel in my 'idle' time, while traveling or waiting in line and such. I adore tablets for that, even if I despise thumb typing. It's a sappy little love story about two wizards, a little bit of a departure from Scoundrel's Answer, but a nice one, I think. I'll try to get a sample of it up here when it is polished enough to do so.