Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.
Today, my special guest is Jeanette Smith. Jeanette is a copy editor, content writer, and mermaid Instagrammer based in Fort Worth, Texas. She aims to demystify the editing process through self-editing instruction and helps authors to produce the best manuscript possible. She's the author of Modern Myrrh, Become the Mermaid of Your Dreams. Her fiction works have appeared in multiple publications, including Glassworks Magazine, Jelly Bucket, and 2nd Chance Lit.
Jeanette, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Jeanette Smith [00:01:00]:
Absolutely, Susan. I am so excited to talk about my favorite subjects.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:04]:
And I hope we are going to demystify the confusion that I know that so many authors have when it comes to editing. I mean, we've got developmental editing, copy editing, line editing, proof editing, index editing, ghostwriting. There's so many different types of editing, and yet the average author just sort of talks about editing, and they can't differentiate one from another. Let's start off and have you demystify these different types of editing processes.
Jeanette Smith [00:01:42]:
Absolutely, Susan. As you said, there are many types of editing and ways that editorial professionals can help you. The main ones that you hit upon were developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading. I just said them in the order in which you should think of those. And the reason you should think of these in this order is that you want to make editing as efficient as possible. When you edit in this order from developmental down to proofreading, you are doing the least amount of work possible for each stage, which I think is what everyone wants to do. Right? The least amount of work possible. So developmental, you are looking at the big picture stuff.
Jeanette Smith [00:02:23]:
Right? You've written the book. Now you're asking yourself, does this section make sense? Is the flow of my argument logical? Did I use all the examples I wanted to give? In fiction, do I have all the scenes, the plot, the world building? Right? In nonfiction, you're talking about your structure, your sections, your arguments, the flow, that kind of thing. And the reason you edit that first is that you don't wanna go and do the grammar on a section that you later cut out. So, we need to get the big part of it, the big structure done first. And then line editing is kind of at the sentence level. That's your wording. Right? Are you writing in a way that is readable for people, that is at their grade level, that is understandable? Is your sentence flow logical? That kind of thing. And then copy editing, you go into sort of the mechanics of grammar, spelling, punctuation, consistency, things like that.
Jeanette Smith [00:03:18]:
And then proofreading is kind of the last little thing at the end that just makes sure every word on the page and every punctuation mark is in the right place. When you do the editing steps in this order, you're really making it as efficient as possible because you're only doing the harder steps of editing, which I think they get harder as they go on, on the fewest amount of words possible. Right? The right words that you want on the page.
Susan Friedmann [00:03:43]:
Yeah. Oh, that was beautiful. You just broke that down beautifully. And as you said, so that we know exactly what each one refers to. Now I know that you have your own self editing process that you teach your authors. Can you share some of that with us? How would our listeners go about doing some self editing before they even start looking for a professional?
Jeanette Smith [00:04:14]:
Absolutely. I think for me, there's 3 pillars to self editing. And those pillars include your mindset, the actual knowledge of how to edit, and the tools that you use to edit. And if you have a solid foundation and understanding of each of these three aspects, then you will become a good self editor. The mindset is like, how do we approach editing? How is it different than writing? How do we keep up when editing gets hard? Things like that. The mindset is such an important aspect. The knowledge, of course, knowing what to change, what to look for, how to change it, that is super important to have a good foundation with. And then the tools that you use, there's a bunch of different word processors and editing programs and professional editors that you can use, books, blogs, style guides, all sorts of things that you can tap into to learn editing and support your editing.
Jeanette Smith [00:05:12]:
I really think that it boils down to those three things. Get your mindset in the right place, gain enough knowledge of what you're doing to apply it, and use the right tools that are gonna help you along the way.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:25]:
Do you have some favorite tools that you could share with us?
Jeanette Smith [00:05:29]:
Absolutely. There's some great tools out there, and it depends all on what you need it for. If you're looking for help with the sort of broader developmental structural type stuff, you're gonna be looking for programs like autocrit or fictionary, things like that, books on structuring your arguments and things like that. If you are looking for copy editing type stuff, you might pick up, one of my favorites is Dreyer's English. A few years old at this point, but it's literally a laugh out loud funny book about grammar, right? So, you can brush up on all these topics but those are my favorite is some of the online programs are pretty good for helping get over writer's block and figure out some of the mechanics. And then definitely just books. There's a bunch of books out there that help so much.
Susan Friedmann [00:06:18]:
I know that authors, when they start the writing process and they don't like it, I mean, I've fallen foul to this that you start editing stuff that you've written maybe the day before. Talk to us about maybe the error of doing that.
Jeanette Smith [00:06:38]:
Oh, for sure. I always caution people on this particular subject that I am not a good personal example. This should be a do as I say, not as I do because I am notorious for going and reading what I wrote the day before and editing that and then continuing on. And then the next day, I go and edit that part and then I continue on. So I am not the best person to tell you how to do this. But the one thing I can say is that the reason I can do this is that I know enough about the editing process to understand what to do when I go back and edit, what to look at, and what to ignore. I think it's okay to have that process, but you have to understand what you should actually be doing during those times and what you should hold off until later. It's definitely not the ideal way to edit.
Jeanette Smith [00:07:29]:
I do recommend just right, right, right, right, right till the end and then go and edit altogether. But it can work to some degree. It can be helpful to some degree. So I I can't tell people not to do it completely.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:43]:
Yeah. I know that I didn't know at the time, especially my first book. There was all these different editing processes, and, of course, I'm a little bit of a wordsmith. I inherited that from my dad. And I go in and sort of start to play with the words and take up far too much time doing that process. But let's say you've written for the day 2, 3, 4, 5, however many pages. What is the process when you come back the following day? How do you know where to pick up? Or do you go back and read maybe the last paragraph or the last page of what you've written so that you can get back into the flow?
Jeanette Smith [00:08:31]:
I think that's fair to say is that you should do some rereading. There's a lot of theories and tactics you can use, I guess, might be the word, to figure out how to keep writing the next day. I have a friend who sets a timer for her writing. And at the end of the timer, even if she is in the middle of a sentence, she will stop typing. And then it will get her excited to come back to the keyboard the next day because she wants to finish that sentence and she keeps, you know, moving on with her thought process. There's all sorts of ways that you can get yourself excited about writing the next thing without having to read the 5, 6 pages every single day. I like to leave notes to myself if I'm stopping in the middle of a story. So I'll write the story, and then when I'm ready to stop, if I know what's gonna happen next, I'll just write, have person do this, say this, you know, move here, get to this, show this.
Jeanette Smith [00:09:25]:
I leave myself notes as to what I want to do next. Again, all sorts of different ways that you can come back to your writing without having to go over all of your work from the day before because that is absolutely how you get tempted to go and edit all that work from the day before, and that is not what we want. We wanna keep writing. So
Susan Friedmann [00:09:47]:
Exactly. I think that's, as I said, that that's where I went wrong so many times. I love the idea of leaving notes because and I've heard that tactic of stopping in the middle of a sentence, and then I would be like, what was I thinking? You know? So the idea of leaving myself a note where I would pick up with that thought, I like that.
Jeanette Smith [00:10:10]:
I'll tell you one of my favorite tricks. The letters t k do not appear that often in the English language together. When you're leaving something out, when you're trying to leave a note to yourself to do something later, write the letters t k in caps, and then write your note to yourself. And when you're ready to go through your document and fill in those gaps, you just search for t k, and it takes you to every single one of those notes where you said, hey, t k, I have this idea. Let me fill it in. You can t k all over your work, and it's so easy to find it later. If you are getting stuck on that one bit and you wanna move on to the next section, just leave yourself a note with the TK and move on and keep writing.
Susan Friedmann [00:10:52]:
That's beautiful. What about some games you can play when, let's say, you have the so called writer's block? And I know that I don't believe in it anymore, but I used to. What are some games you can play instead of just looking at that screen or that blank piece of paper and, like, what should I be writing?
Jeanette Smith [00:11:17]:
Absolutely. I think there's a lot of ways to overcome writer's block. One of my friends calls it page fright. It's easy to get caught up in the pressure of writing. I think when it comes down to writer's block that it is mental. Right? It's always mental. I always recommend taking a step away. Go do some journaling.
Jeanette Smith [00:11:39]:
Don't put the pressure on yourself of writing your book. Go journal about your idea or your life or whatever it is that you're gonna write about. Go have a new experience. Go talk to someone about your idea and see what they say and have these conversations. There's so many ways you can spark those ideas again, but I really feel like when you experience writer's block, it's kind of like your battery saying, hey. Low low. Recharge. Recharge.
Jeanette Smith [00:12:07]:
You need to find what to do to recharge it rather than just barreling ahead until you're fully exhausted.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:14]:
I like that idea. I think that's brilliant. I know a favorite subject that you and I spent a little bit of time chatting about before we came on the air, Jeanette, was mistakes authors make with regard to the whole editing process. I know you said that there are many. Let's look at, let's say, the 3 common mistakes. What are those?
Jeanette Smith [00:12:39]:
In terms of self editing, and I'm gonna give you one for each type of editing that you need to self edit for. But in terms of self editing, the number one mistake I see developmentally is not having structure. This is especially true in nonfiction where you are putting forth an idea and a logical argument and giving evidence and stories and things like that. You can't just have it willy nilly. There needs to be some sort of structure to why the chapters are in that order, why the headings occur as they do, why that part is in a list instead of in a paragraph. Right? You need to have logic to those decisions. I think that's probably in developmentally. The one thing I would say is that you need to have structure.
Jeanette Smith [00:13:23]:
In terms of line editing, I think the biggest mistake, again, especially in nonfiction, is writing above the grade level that you should be writing at. When you think about the types of people you want to read your work, you actually want to be writing at a grade level 3 to 4 grades below that. But if you want people who are college graduates to read your work and understand it, you should be writing at a high school level. People choose big words and complicated sentence structures that just make it hard for people to understand your work. If it's work to understand your words, then they're not gonna enjoy your book and listen to your message. Definitely with line editing, keep things simple. And then copy editing, it's really hard to nail down one thing, but I think the thing that bothers me the most when I copy edit is that a professional copy edit will copy edit quotes. We will fact check things like quotes and make sure that people said them and where they came from and create bibliographies and things like that.
Jeanette Smith [00:14:22]:
Please, please, please cite your quotes. Wikipedia is not a place to get quotes. Quotes a to z is not a place to get quotes. Brainy quotes is not a place to get quotes. You need to go to the sources, the articles, the interviews, the books where these things are actually written down and cite those things. Because if you want to be taken seriously, you don't wanna have Wikipedia in your bibliography of your nonfiction book. I would say in, like, broad level, if I had to choose 1 for each style, those would be the 3 things I would say definitely pay attention to.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:57]:
When you talked about structure, it made me think about that when I was writing my dummies book, Business Meeting Events for Dummies, that I had to write the entire table of contents in the immense detail. I mean, if anybody looks at Padami's book, you'll see the table of contents. Sometimes it's like 10 pages. But that was the skeleton, and they had to approve that before I could do any writing. I'd done the skeleton, and then all I had to do was put the meat on the bones, and it really made it so much easier.
Jeanette Smith [00:15:38]:
Absolutely. That is such a good way to, again, even beat writer's block. Make an outline and just fill in the gaps and make that outline as detailed as possible.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:48]:
I liked what you said about the line editing and thinking about the education level. And when you were saying people use big words and it's hard to understand, I'm thinking academia. They love doing that. And it's so hard to read anything academic because of that style. I've heard that the average reading age is around 5th, 6th grade level. What's your philosophy or thinking on that?
Jeanette Smith [00:16:23]:
Absolutely. I mean, I think the lower you can go in terms of readability, the better. And the reason I say that is that you don't have to dumb down your message in order to make it clear. You can use simple words in simple short sentences that get across the same meaning as a sentence that's 35 words long and has 12 commas. If you can simplify things, it doesn't mean that you are talking down to your reader. It doesn't mean that you are making this, you know, like, so simple that it reads like a picture book. All you're doing is taking away the barrier between the information and that person's brain. Right? Because they have to interpret the words.
Jeanette Smith [00:17:06]:
So if the words themselves are hard to understand, it's gonna take more brainpower to interpret, and they're gonna have to work harder to get that message. I really think the lowest you can go in terms of readability grade level while not talking down to your reader is really that sweet spot where you should be.
Susan Friedmann [00:17:25]:
Jeanette, let's talk about how would you go about finding the right match of an editor when you have your work professionally done? You've done the self editing piece, but then you go out and look for an editor. What's the best process?
Jeanette Smith [00:17:44]:
I think one of the things to remember is that editors do specialize. Just like you should be doing different levels of editing yourself, different editors will do different levels and concentrate on different levels of editing. It's really about being honest with yourself about where you need that help if you're gonna use an editor. Very few people I know use an editor for every type of the editing. Usually, there's, you know, 1 or 2 types where you can get by with your own knowledge and your own structure and that kind of thing. But if you are gonna use an editor, make sure that you know what type of editing you need. Seek out an editor who specializes in that as well as your genre. There are hundreds of places to find professional editors who will do a good job.
Jeanette Smith [00:18:32]:
LinkedIn, Reedsy, the EFA, the ACES website. If you're in Europe, CIEP is a great organization to look at. All of these are places where editors have profiles. You can Google keywords that, you know, editor who edits business books about x y z and see whose website pops up. When you choose an editor, definitely make sure you're choosing them for the right service. And then the other thing about it is you're gonna find people with all sorts of qualifications, all sorts of price ranges, all sorts of timelines. In the end, I think one of the most important things is once they match the basics of what you are have to pay for it and how long you have to get it done and stuff like that, is the vibe of you and that editor because you are trusting this person with your work, and that takes a lot of courage. And you want to have an editor who is on your side and who you feel supports you.
Jeanette Smith [00:19:33]:
And even if the feedback is somewhat critical or speaks to a weakness of yours or something that needs improvement, you're learning from it. You're not feeling bogged down by it. I think that personality aspect when hiring an editor is way overlooked or underlooked, I guess, underutilized. And it just it's such an important part of finding the right fit and finding the right service.
Susan Friedmann [00:20:00]:
One of the things, and I know I've fallen into this trap too, is that we fall in love with our own work. Then when you've got another set of eyes on it, they say, well, this doesn't fit or this isn't necessary. And you're like, oh, but that was my baby. I love that part. How would you respond to that?
Jeanette Smith [00:20:19]:
If you're thinking about a book as a baby, that's a pretty good analogy there. When you have a baby, you created that thing. It is yours. It is made of your DNA. But as you nurture that baby and as that baby grows, you're gonna be learning a lot of lessons. You're gonna be doing a lot of things wrong. You're gonna need to change the way that you approach things because you might have one idea, but the baby needs something else. Right? And so if what you're doing isn't working, take advice from other people and people who've been there before.
Jeanette Smith [00:20:53]:
I think when it comes to editing a book, it's really the same way. You have to realize that as you nurture your book through editing into a final product, that it's gonna be hard. You're gonna face times where you really wanna hold on to something, but your book is just growing beyond it. And you have to think of it as an improvement and not as a setback.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:15]:
Excellent. I have to ask you about AI. What are your thoughts?
Jeanette Smith [00:21:21]:
AI is here to stay. I have fully come to terms with that. I think current usage of AI is fairly irresponsible. I find, you know, Facebook ads that go by for programs that are like, you don't have to write the book, but you can publish it and sell it. And I just think that that's looking at AI all wrong. Right? AI is not a tool to replace our creativity or replace our own words. It is a tool to maybe learn from or find examples from or get ideas from. It's not a tool to replace what human creativity can do.
Jeanette Smith [00:21:58]:
So I have many issues with AI. I try to avoid using it myself, partially also for the environmental concerns that are there with AI. And I think AI can be helpful in so many applications, but the way that it's currently being used by the general public is not how it should be. We gotta change that.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:21]:
Well, thank you. You know, always liked that different perspective on where it fits in because I remember one of my editors was, like, appalled when it first came out. And she's like, oh, my goodness. I've lost my job. Nobody's gonna use me anymore. I was like, no, I don't think that's the case at all. I think it's just a tool, as you rightly say, but it's how you use it that's most important. This is a great segue, Jeanette, to have you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you, your services, and especially your self instruction assessment or your I can't remember what it was called, but, yes, go ahead.
Jeanette Smith [00:23:06]:
Absolutely. So I am super easy to get ahold of. My website is Jeanettethewriter.com It's [email protected]. You can find me under Jeanette Smith on LinkedIn. I am all over the place. But what I do wanna offer any of the listeners is there's a little download I have that is a self editing assessment, And this is designed to help you understand where your weaknesses may lie and where your strengths may lie. So it's gonna ask you questions about the different levels of editing and how confident you are in those certain tasks, and then you score yourself.
Jeanette Smith [00:23:45]:
And the score corresponds to a, hey, yeah, you could probably do this. Maybe get some more training, and you should really hire someone. It's there to help you understand what types of editing you might be able to do and what you might want to get a little bit of help on.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:01]:
Beautiful. And as you know, Jeanette, we always ask our guests to leave our listeners with a golden nugget, those final words of wisdom. What would you like to leave our listeners with?
Jeanette Smith [00:24:14]:
One of my most important things that just starts off everything is the idea that if you want to be a better writer, you don't need to write more. You need to learn to edit your writing because if you just continue to write and write and write and you never look at it and you never, you know, evaluate it, then you're never gonna be able to make it better. Really, when you think about a goal of yours being, I want to be a better writer, the way to do that is through editing. So if you take that mindset, hopefully, it makes editing a little easier, a little more pleasurable, a little more feels like it's useful, like it's doing something for you. But just remember that you really can't be better at writing without first editing.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:00]:
Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. There were so many gems, and we covered so much in the time. Listeners, this is definitely one you need to listen to it again and again to grab all the nuggets and the treasures that Jeanette shared with us.
And if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. Go to BookMarketingBrainstorm.com
to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books.Â
Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
