With most outside commercial editors, you go through one major copy edit of the manuscript; when you’re editing yourself, you most often go through two. But I realized at the end of mine that I actually needed to go through a third round of edits with my manuscript, because I decided at the last second that I was simply talking about the housemates in my co-op a little too much, and I have to still live with them after the book comes out, so it would be the most judicious option to simply delete all personal thoughts about them from the entire manuscript. So I did that, sat down, and looked at the entire manuscript again; then realized I wanted to cut even more mentions of my housemates, so technically went through a fourth edit to do so, although you can really think of these two edits as “3A” and “3B.”

This is just a short part of the overall self-publishing process, a step that took a single day; but I wanted to pull it off as its own writeup, to help emphasize just how important it is in self-publishing to prioritize putting the book through as much work as is needed to make it as great as it can be, versus adhering strictly to some made-up arbitrary date at the risk of putting out a subpar book. I see this all the time in self-publishing, and it’s such a shame, because this is one of the greatest freedoms you have as a self-publisher; you’re not in the marketing meatgrinder of some multinational corporation that couldn’t care less about your book, and want it at this specific date so they can get it out a week before the newest superhero movie ends up eating up all their time. 

If you have the time, sit with the manuscript again after this second or third or fourth edit or whatever it is. Let some time pass and then approach it with fresh eyes again. With luck, you’ll see no further problems and you’ll be ready to move on; at worst, you simply catch the problems you wanted to catch before publication anyway, before the problem is happening in front of your reader and they’re leaving a 1-star review on your Amazon page afterwards. Because to be clear, once you give the okay at this point, the manuscript enters a state known as “locked down,” which means that no more changes can be made until all the way in the very final proofread before publication, and even then only minor changes to individual words. That’s when the manuscript begins the process known as “production,” which ends with the files for printing the final paperback book, which we’ll be looking at in detail in the next chapter.

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