Editing

Every book, no matter how great the first draft, needs editing.
The books you pick off the shelf in a bookstore have gone through multiple rounds of revisions. Often books have been revised between 10-20 times before they are published.

A trope is a storytelling element that has been used so many times that it has become a convention. The term trope is used broadly and can cover aspects of storytelling such as figures of speech (e.g. ‘paint the town red’), imagery (e.g. a human rising through the air toward a UFO), character (e.g. the jaded cop two weeks from retirement) or a plot structure ( e.g. the ‘chosen one’ teenager who saves the world while choosing between two love interests).

Much as with movies, beta readers are your test audience. They are a group of people who read your novel as a whole and provide feedback on what did and didn’t work for them

Developmental editing, also known as structural editing, looks at the big picture of your book and asks the question: How can we make this a more compelling story?

There are four main types of book editing and it’s important to be familiar with them so you can apply them at the correct stages of the revision process.