Eagle Eyed Editor

In the early days of indie publishing it used to be easy to spot self-published work.  Far too many authors rushed their books to publication without proper editing, without taking a good, hard look at their story.

If you are indie publishing you have to become your own eagle-eyed editor.  And you have to learn not only to spot typos and dodgy punctuation, but also how to shape the overall book.

So you've started in the right place with something happening, and you've introduced the main  character as the first viewpoint, but still you sense something's wrong.  The editor in you needs to figure out what.

It might be your use of language.  Carol Westron runs a search on her computer for the word 'that" when she's editing, and deletes most of them.  Eileen Robertson dislikes 'suddenly', and is quick to tell me when I've started six paragraphs in a row with 'she'.

When I was writing Panthera : Death Spiral, avoiding plot repetitions while switching between four viewpoints was a challenge.  And when I wrote Panthera : Death Song I had five viewpoints to work with.  I did have to do some rewrites to cut out repetitions of the action, even though the novel was fully worked out before I started to write.

Tenses need keeping under control too.  In the Panthera books the human viewpoints are third person past tense, but Panthera's viewpoint is first person present tense,  I needed to keep a sharp eye out when editing for places where I'd failed to switch tense in the right place.

Even if you're not self-publishing you need to be your own eagle-eyed editor.  If you're submitting mainstream you're far more likely to attract the attention of an agent or editor with a polished, sharply edited piece of work.