Wattpad brings you a guest post from Abbie Gibbs, author of “The Dark Heroine: Dinner With A Vampire.”
The paperback copy of Abbie’s new novel published by HarperCollins is available in the UK! Below, she shares with us the intense editing process for her book:
Frantic studying, taking your last exams, going to prom, gaining a boyfriend – pretty familiar summer territory for many teenagers. How about sitting in your local library in the blistering heat with an editor, about to edit your manuscript because you had been offered a publishing contract a month after you left school? Sound a bit like something out of a book?
Oh no. This was actually happening to me.
Signing a six-figure, two book deal with HarperCollins for my book The Dark Heroine: Dinner With A Vampire certainly turned my summer upside-down, though it didn’t completely come as a surprise. I had been writing on Wattpad for roughly three years under the alias Canse12, gaining 17 million reads and what I believe is the best fan base a girl could have – the Wattpad kind, of course. That brought me to the attention of my awesome agent, Scott, and I knew that at some point I was going to have to face the editing process.
So what is the edit? Simply put, the edit is comprised of three steps: a structural edit (usually a list of revisions to do with plot, characterisation, etc. sent to the author), a line edit (word changes), and a copy edit (spelling, grammar and punctuation). The first two are the stuff of nightmares for writers. Being told you have to cut, add to and alter your precious, precious story (think Gollum from Lord of the Rings here) is something none of us want to do, but inevitably have to. And for me, it was going to be really, really hard, because:
A) The turnaround for my book, from acceptance to eBook publication, was two months. (To put this in context, contract to print, it usually takes years).
B) My manuscript was 200,000 words long. Yes, you read that correctly.
Therefore, things were going to be done a little differently: instead of an edit letter containing revisions, I got my actual editor, Amy from HarperVoyager UK. Together, in my beautiful home country of Devon, we spent two days looking over her suggestions for the structural and line edit, drinking coffee and emailing revisions to each other at midnight. A week and an all-nighter on my part later, 50,000 words had been cut from The Dark Heroine. It made my history exam look like a piece of cake, but having your editor in person has its perks: when in a local bookstore, Amy pointed out several books featuring a cover model she knew, and showed me a published book she had rejected some time before – a moment that certainly made me reflect on rejection.
I’m told I’m going to find editing my second book a slow process, though I prefer to think it will be more relaxed. Whether an intense, in-person edit is the better process? I’ll let you read The Dark Heroine and decide for yourselves.
Read the first 20 chapters of Abbie’s original manuscript for The Dark Heroine on Wattpad!
Get a copy of Abbie’s published novel “The Dark Heroine: Dinner With A Vampire”:
Kindle UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Dark-Heroine-Vampire-ebook/dp/B008ZU6B3C
Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-dark-heroine-abigail-gibbs/1112757135?ean=9780062248749
Paperback: available in the UK