Self Editing my Novel with Kindle App - Author Brittany Wang // hey writers if you watched my goals video last week you'll know that I am
moving towards publication of my YA fairy fantasy book called
on wings of ash and dust and it's super exciting but in that process I know I
need to do a lot of editing before I can get to the final product this year so I
was thinking you'd be really cool to periodically do little videos like this
where I share what I'm learning in the editing process or any tools that I'm
coming across or systems or ways of editing that are helping me and just to
put it out there I do not yet have a step-by-step system that totally works
for me I'm very much still learning as I go
but I love videos like this when people share hey I'm trying this out or hey
like I found this tool and I wanted to pass it on and so basically that's what
I figured I'd do so if that sounds good to you let me know in the comments below
let me know what kind of struggles you have with editing because I know I've
experienced a little bit of a paralysis and when I get these kind of tools and
systems and ideas that I can try I feel like I can actually move forward and the
editing tool I want to talk about today and sort of the editing hack I want to
share is doing a fast read-through of your book using the Kindle app from all
the research and videos I've watched on editing and sort of taking everybody's
insights in some of the things I keep hearing is one to take a nice long break
after you've finished a certain draft so you have some perspective as you go into
it but the next thing is to do a fast read through which basically means
you're going to read through your entire book and make quick notes or highlights
so you can sort of see your book as a whole as a reader would see it and
because you've taken a nice long break you can now have some true perspective
going into your story and maybe see things that you didn't see before
because you were just too close to it a lot of writers also suggest to put your
story in a different medium than what you wrote it so if you typed it on your
computer they usually say to print it out and put it in a big binder and make
your notes in the margins and highlights on there and it's sort of you know like
reading a real book because it's in physical form and very similar to what
your readers will feel like reading your book but then I also heard a few people
talking about putting the book in electronic
format not a Word document like a Kindle app or some kind of eReader now I've
done the printed out binder version before and there were some things that I
didn't really like about that process and some of those things is I usually
had to be sitting down at a desk or on my couch with like everything around me
like my highlighters and my pens and be situated in a certain way to read so I
couldn't be sort of editing on the go or doing the fast read through on the go I
also felt like I got slowed down a little bit because I wanted to switch
between pens and highlighters and different things like that so opening
and closing and miss placing like items as I was trying to do the read through
was just distracting I also really didn't like printing out the whole thing
because when I sort of felt like I was wasting paper a little bit I know I
really wasn't wasting it because it was going to a good cause but there's a lot
of paper and you know it costs money to print out as well
and so for all of these reasons I decided that this time I was going to
try doing the fast read through on my kindle and because I've done this my
phone is always with me so I can continue the fast read through at any
time no matter if I'm at home or out I'm not wasting paper or carrying around a
big heavy binder and I found that highlighting with the four colours that
Kindle gives you and the ability to actually add notes in there and all the
notes are searchable it's just been like really cool I'm gonna show you a little
preview here with somebody else's book because I don't want to show you too
much of my own story quite yet but basically yeah here it's just easy to do
the highlights and you can then see the different kind of highlights you can
look at all of the highlights at once or even filter them so if I just want to
look at all the highlights that just have to do with my characters I put all
of those in pink so I can now filter in and just see all the pink highlights and
notes that I made for those characters another category I have is
world-building so that is in this color and then I have my developmental or like
bigger edits that I want to tackle first in this color and then finally I have
more like line and copy edits and just little inconsistencies that I found
in this final color here and those I would then tackle after tackling the
bigger developmental edits I do wish that the Kindle app had more than just
four colors to choose from because it would be really helpful and fun to make
like one color one character and another color another character but I am getting
around this a little bit by using the notes feature to make more specific
notes and then also I am using a doc which I will show up here that I'm sort
of working through right now chapter by chapter but I might just want to like do
the whole fast read through and then come back to this document after so you
could do it really either way but what I would then do is for example filtering
all of my highlights so I am just seeing the character ones and then going to the
character section in my document here and typing for each character the
different edits or even just different details that I want to Chronicle about
them so that I can create somewhat of a series Bible or story Bible for my story
if you're applauded then this is really great because you can then use this
document to update your series Bible or your chapter summaries or outline but
also if you're a panther this is really great because maybe you wanted to
discover the story for yourself in the first draft but now you really want to
start taking stock of what is in each chapter and what color is that
character's hair am I staying consistent with them throughout the whole story so
you can really use this method for editing but also just cataloging
everything important to your story especially if you're writing a series so
if you haven't already checked it out I do have a whole video all about series
and story Bibles and how to create one and I also have some free templates if
you want to get started right away so you can check that out in the
description below but overall for editing purposes this has just been
really great for me in the last two days I've read and taken notes on over 1/3 of
my book and my book is a hundred and twenty eight thousand words right now so
that's pretty good for me and I'm really excited to just take all of the notes
that I've gotten from this fast read through into the document I also have
beta reader notes that I'm going to be putting into the document as well and
then sort of making like a check list of which edits I need to make
priority especially with a certain mentorship opportunity coming up called
author mentor match that I want to enter in February but finally a bunch of you
are probably wondering okay this sounds really great but how do I get my book on
to my Kindle and not just in a PDF format where you can't really highlight
things and make notes but in like a Kindle format where you can actually do
all that stuff for sake of keeping this video so I short I will just link below
and in the cards to a video with a step-by-step process that shows the
steps and tools I followed in order to do this and even add a fun temporary
cover so that when you're looking in your Kindle library you actually have a
fun cover for your book I created mine in canva if I decide to show a little
preview here none of these pictures are my own pictures I am borrowing them I'm
not using them anywhere else but just to show you a little example of what you
could create just for yourself and just for fun but yeah so definitely check
that out if you're interested in trying out this method and if you do it and it
is helpful for you or you find any other hacks definitely let me know that in the
comments because you guys know I always love to learn from you guys too right
now I'm going to go continue that fast feed through but if you enjoyed this
additive hack and want to see even more don't forget to subscribe hit the like
button on this video and if you want even more read early videos like this
one in the meantime check out one of these two and we'll see you there
you