Since professional editing for Not Interested will be kicking off soon, I thought I'd share some details on my editing process.

When "writing a book"—well, correction, when "publishing" a book—the writing part is really only half the work.

I started writing in middle school, probably around 2014. So I've been doing this for over ten years now. When I started out on Wattpad, it was great because I could just draft and write my books (I'll have another blog post talking about the process I follow for that at some point), and then I could post them and not worry about spelling errors (and there were a lot of them—I suck at spelling) and grammar.

I wasn't professionally publishing my books or asking anyone for money to read them, so posting what I now think is shit writing online wasn't a huge deal.

When I decided to start publishing my books, I began to learn how much extra work I would have to do.

Five Years and 2,000 Miles was the first book I published. It had been on Wattpad for about two years before I decided I was going to edit it and publish it. And I quickly realized I am what I call an "over-writer."

When I copied that into a single Word document, I learned that baby was over 200k words.

And so came the first step of my editing process.

Step One: Remove the Stuff That Isn't Needed

Reread #1

This is really hard with romance, I think, because a lot of the things that aren't needed are cute conversations and sweet moments. But we don't need 200k of those.

So, I reread my entire book, fix any spelling errors that stick out, highlight any sentences that read funny so I can re-evaluate them, and remove paragraphs of writing that aren't needed. I even take out entire chapters sometimes.

Step Two: What Is Missing?

A lot of times during my rereads, I notice that things are missing. Honestly, most of the time, since the books I've published so far have been college romances, I'm missing breaks.

One of the last chapters I wrote in my upcoming book Not Interestedwas a spring break chapter because I got through my reread and realized, wait, this takes place during second semester. They have to have a spring break.

I actually forgot about it in If It's Meant to Be as well, and had to rewrite the beginning of one of my chapters to make it so a week had passed and Hale had gone home and thought about his problems with Logan over spring break.

These are the chapters and parts I add in this step.

Step Three: Go Back Over My Highlighted Sections and Fix Them

This is where I scroll through my file, find all the highlighted parts, and fix them.

I also have a list of phrases and words I know I use too much saved on my phone, and I highlight every single instance of them throughout the book and go through and reword or remove them wherever I can.

If you think my characters sigh a lot now, you'd be amazed by my first draft. It's like every single breath is a sigh.

Lots of nodding too. And they're always doing way too much with their eyes and gazes. Ugh. I try to clean all of that up in this step.

Step Four: Reread #2

With all that stuff cleaned up, it's time to download my novel as a PDF document and open it in a PDF editor on my trusty iPad.

I reread the whole thing again, and I mark it up with red as I go. Again, highlighting anything that reads weird and fixing any typos and things that stand out.

Then, I go through and update the file on my laptop with these edits.

Step Five: Reread #3

I like to print my novels and read them in book form, so I do this. Usually by this point, it seems pretty clean to me, so I mark it up with a pen or pencil and flag those sections with sticky notes.

Then, when I'm finished with the book, I make those changes on my laptop as well.

Step Six: Professional Editor!

I use Reedsy to find an editor and send the file over to them. It's really nice because I get a month-long break from my book while they're working on it.

Step Seven: Review the Editor's Notes

I look over all the suggested changes and make the ones I need to or want to. A lot are grammar-based and need to be fixed, but sometimes they suggest a certain wording or adding certain things to the story, and I take the ones I like and leave the ones I don't.

Step Eight: My Proofreader (Thanks, Mom!)

I hand my books over to my proofreader, who is my mother. She reads, gives me feedback, and texts me about anything off she notices, and I make small fixes according to what she finds.

And then... I upload the file to Amazon and publish!

The whole process really is a headache, and it takes months, but I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.