Should I get an editor before a publisher or agent?

Before you start querying agents or publishers, you should write a great book. Whatever means you use to achieve it, you need to write the best book you can. That is the simplest answer possible. Publishers in the traditional publishing industry want books they can publish with as little extra work as possible. Literary agents want books they can easily pitch to their publishing contacts. No traditional publisher or literary agent wants to take on a book or a writer who hasn’t already come a long way on the road to being a polished author.

Your job as author is to show them that your book is ready for that. This is true whatever genre you’re writing: general fiction, women’s fiction, speculative fiction, children’s fiction, non-fiction, memoir… 

If you want anyone to be interested in reading your book you need to go through editing. Professional editing highlights problems with your manuscript you won’t spot yourself. Plot holes. Weak character arcs and development. Narrative viewpoint problems. Style issues. 

Write a Great Manuscript 

Editing is highly valuable. Before you query publishers and agents, you should get a professional edit of your manuscript. You can learn a lot from getting an edit too. You can take this learning with you into the next book you write. 

That sounds frustrating to any writer, though. You want your manuscript to be sellable, don’t you? You don’t want that story and all those hours of writing to be just a learning experience.

The Business of Writing

Writing can feel pretty lonely. It can feel like you’re meant to figure it out all on your own, especially when you listen to some of the ‘advice’ in writing forums and groups. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Being a writer doesn’t have to be a solitary lifestyle. Being a writer doesn’t mean you have to learn through slow, painful experience. Investing in support means you can get where you want to be faster. You can get through the uncertainty about how to structure a novel, create great characters with strong motivations and goals, and hone a style and voice that your readers will love. You can make progress in leaps and bounds, not just in tiny steps.

This doesn’t mean you don’t need an editor before you try to land yourself a publisher or agent, if you’re planning to take the traditional publishing route. You still do. But it means that your editor will be able to help you tweak your manuscript enough to give you the best chance of attracting attention with it.

Do you get upset when people can’t see your story’s value? Especially when they say they’re interested in what you want to share with the world, but their actions don’t live up to this? They don’t read your blog (never mind share it), don’t come to your talks, don’t put their money where their mouths are.

I know, it is frustrating when that happens. It can even leave you feeling rejected, as if your story isn’t worth telling. I feel your pain. But I’m going to tell you where you’ve been going wrong so that you can start to fix it.

All Our Stories Have Value

It’s true – ALL our stories have value, intrinsically. Whether your story is about climbing an impossible mountain (literally or metaphorically), about your years in front of adolescent pupils, or about a boy wizard. Your stories come from within you. As such, they are valuable.

So why don’t others recognise the value of them? Why do you feel like nobody cares? This is the truth of the matter… all of us –including you – only care about the stories of other people when the parts of our brains which control empathy, imagination and emotion have been stimulated. In other words, we only give a flying fiddle about someone else’s story when we can imagine ourselves in that situation and facing the same challenges.

You might be thinking right now: “That isn’t the way I think. I always care about other people’s stories. I’m really interested in other people.”

I’m not denying that you have a normal degree of empathy in your psychology. That empathy has to be triggered, though. Unless you are an extreme empath, you do not engage with others’ experiences entirely by your own devices. That would be a very uncomfortable nature to have. How would you ever get any peace from other people’s pain?

What Those Storytellers Have Done…

Those storytellers who have triggered your empathy have done so in such a skilful way that you probably don’t even realised they did anything. That’s why you think it’s all down to your own empathy. What they have done is tell their story in such a way that they have made your brain experience it as if it is actually happening to YOU, not to them or their character. They’ve got into your head and made you feel as if you are there, with the problems and threats in the story facing YOU.

Your brain does not know the difference between the sights, sounds and smells in real life, and the sights, sounds and smells you are only hearing in a story. That sounds insane, I know, but it’s true. If a neuroscientist looked at scans of your brain in the two scenarios, there would be no marked difference in the bits that lit up.

How Do I Fix My Stories Then?

Our imaginations are linked to our senses. Learn to tell your stories by stimulating your audience’s senses. Once they can imagine it, they can begin to develop empathy. Once they have developed empathy, they will begin to care about what happens in the story. They will be captivated because, you see, they no longer feel that it is someone else’s story. It is now their story as well as your own.

Would you love to learn how to tell stories that captivate? Join The Storytellers’ Academy.

Curious? Want to discover more? Join the FREE group I’ve Got a Story to Tell.

Is nobody reading your stories? You’re probably doing THIS wrong…

You write a story, put it out there… and nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nobody (apart from your mum) seems to care. It’s a powerful story, one which had an impact on you when you lived or imagined it. Why doesn’t anyone comment on it or share it? The wind has been taken completely out of your sails. What went wrong?

Is it because what you have to say is worthless? Definitely not.

Rather, it is because people haven’t seen the value in what you have to say… which is a different matter.

And that is because (brace yourself for the honest feedback) you haven’t provided them with the story in a way that is of value to them. This is totally a problem you can do something about.

Creating an emotional connection with your readers

Go back to the time when you were living a story that you have tried to tell. It doesn’t matter if it’s a true story and you lived it for real, or if it’s a story that only happened in your head. How did you experience it? Or at least, how do you remember experiencing it? You might remember the colours, shapes, light, movements and other visual aspects of the experience. For example, do you remember the way that cloud sped across the sky and turned the ground grey?

Perhaps you recall the sounds more than the sights. The way the school children were shouting in their yard a quarter of a mile away; the way the back door slammed and cut off the noise from outside. Maybe you remember the characteristic rhythm of a clock.

It could be that you remember the feelings in your muscles, joints and ‘guts’ more than the sights or sounds. The way a person shrank in utter defeat or misery; the way you tapped and fiddled with a pen in your nervousness. The way people behaved physically – and changed their behaviour as the story moved on – is a third way you might have experienced the story.

These three ways of experiencing a story (sights, sounds and kinaesthetic sensations) are likely to be the main ways in which YOU experienced that story. The balance between the three ways varies from person to person, but you can be pretty sure that those three types of stimulus were present in your experience of the story.

Now let’s move on to how this can help you tell your story in a way that will help you form an emotional connection with your ideal audience…

Four things you should never say to a writer…

There are some awful things you might have said to a friend who loves writing. You probably said them in all innocence. Allow me to explain why you should never, ever repeat them, since your friend is unlikely to tell you him or herself.

I am a writer. I work with writers. I help people become writers. I know that when a group of writers congregate in a room and one of them tells the others something a well-meaning friend has said, everyone else will wince in shared sympathy and empathy.

That’s because the individuals in that room ‘get’ it. Whatever their ages, genders, races, nationalities, they get it. Even regardless of the genre each of them prefers to write in – which is a far, far greater divide than racial groupings or generations could ever be – they get it.

What should you never, EVER say to a writer? Read on:

2. “What did I think of your story? It was really nice.”

Did you give the story anything more than a quick scan? Did you look at it at all? If not, just say so. If your friend is serious about writing, she wants REAL feedback NOT a platitude. She wants to know what you liked about it, and she wants to know what you didn’t like – what was confusing, what was boring, that kind of thing.
You could actually cause damage to your writer-type friend’s confidence by saying it was ‘nice’. ‘Nice’ is a word we use to describe a gift we think is a bit dull but we don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings. Please, offer a real emotional reaction to that story. Perhaps you were angered or disgusted by something in it: that is better than saying it is ‘nice’.
What if your friend gets offended by you saying this? If she is serious about being a writer, she won’t be. If she is offended… well, she asked… and you won’t have her bothering you for an opinion in the future.

4. “I really liked that one. It reminded me of… you know, that book…”

Please… go and check your facts first. Is your friend’s work really reminiscent of ‘that book’ or is it just that a particular word or character’s name set you thinking of something else you’ve read? Unless there really are glaring similarities, do NOT say this to your friend. It will not be taken as a compliment, even if you’ve compared the text to Pride and Prejudice or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It will be taken by your friend as a sign that he has been wasting his time. What is the point of writing something that has already been written? What publisher will take his book on if it is a rip-off of something else?
What if your friend really has lifted a plot wholesale (even unconsciously) from somewhere else? If you’re sure about it and you’ve double-checked your facts, it would be kindest in the long run to tell him. Do it gently and privately – it will be very bad news, but if he is a good friend he won’t shoot the messenger. (Unless he turns you into a character in a new story and has you murdered in a brutally imaginative fashion. If this happens, you’ve done him a favour by providing him the inspiration for something original.)

So now you know the truth, dear friend-to-a-writer.

Be kind to your writer-type friend, even if to do so you must be cruel. Above all, be honest. Otherwise, you may well recognise yourself in a future story meeting a very sticky end.