JUDGING INDIE FICTION: A Guest Post by Betsy Miller

I'm pleased to welcome Betsy Miller to the blog today, who, as a judge for a well-known indie book award, gives us some interesting ideas on how to help
our books stand out in the crowd. 

Here we go...

Betsy Miller writes books about children’s health topics including the picture books Tiger Livy and Hip, Hop, Hooray for Brooklynn!, and the nonfiction books The Parents’ Guide to Clubfoot, The Parents’ Guide to Perthes, and The Parents’ Guide to Hip Dysplasia. She co-founded Thinking Ink Press, a small press located in Silicon Valley.
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You can reach Betsy through BetsyMillerBooks or on Twitter.

​JUDGING INDIE FICTION

​For the past few years, I’ve been reading and evaluating a lot of indie books as a volunteer judge in the Benjamin Franklin Awards. The judges use criteria based on professional editorial and publishing standards. As I was going through stacks of books again this year, I decided to share my perspective on a few things that indie authors and publishers can act on to make a book stronger, depending on the time and budget that’s available.

Note: I’m not advocating for entering book awards—just sharing some things I’ve noticed over the years.   

Book Basics

Here are some editorial and publishing essentials:

• Know your book’s genre and the usual length. Understand what kind of book you’re aiming for and work to meet your readers’ expectations. Reading widely in the genre you write is a great start.

• Invest in developing your opening chapter. This is where you want to win over readers and where you can lose them even if other parts of your book are very good. Introduce the main character, the central conflict of the book, and the world in which your story takes place.  

• Arrange for your book to be copy edited and proofread before it is published. If you’re self-publishing and can’t afford to hire a professional, consider trading peer edits with other writers or see if you can line up beta readers. Or enlist that picky friend who always complains about typos. Take your friend out to lunch and thank them in the acknowledgements section in your book (unless they prefer not to be named). If someone spends a significant amount of time helping you edit or develop your book, it’s a nice gesture to give them a complimentary copy of your book when it’s published.

• Pay attention to cover design and book formatting. Many authors are more verbal than visual. Your book will look a lot better if a visual person with the right skillset is involved in the cover design and book formatting. If you’re self-publishing and can’t afford to hire someone, then take the time to learn basic principles of book layout and design and typographic conventions. Try to match the style of similar books in your genre.

When You’re Ready to Commit More Editorial Resources

Here are some additional things you can do, to bring up the quality of your book. These may be overlooked by indie authors who are starting out and don’t have a lot of experience or resources.

Some ideas for levelling up your craft:

• Does your book begin at the right point in the story? If you remove the first chapter, does the book still work? It’s common for early drafts of books to include extra details at the beginning when the author is inventing characters and settings. If your book starts too slowly, this might be one reason why.  

Don’t be afraid to try taking away the first chapter. You might need to revise or rewrite the first chapter a number of times to get it to a professional level. This is especially true if you’re figuring out how to write your first book. Think of this as problem-solving and discovering new techniques. This doesn’t mean you’re failing. It just means you’re not finished yet.

• Plan for more than one editing cycle for the whole book. Traditionally published books may go through four editorial cycles: developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading.

If your budget can’t cover all this, then self-edit as much as you can before you hire an editor. I recommend setting aside the book you’ve written for a couple of weeks or longer before you begin to edit. You can also test drive an editor by having a short portion of your work edited so you can get a benchmark of how much revision it needs.

When you revise your work to fix something, it’s normal to discover that you broke a bunch of other things. It’s like a series of dominos where each one knocks over the next. For instance, if you streamline a section that’s dragging, that might create a continuity error later in the book. You will have to find and fix any problems introduced by your revisions. You might need to come up for air and take a break before tackling that task.

• If you’re self-editing, use professional quality reference books or refer to established editorial standards. Look for books like The Chicago Manual of Style for copyediting or Save the Cat Writes a Novel for pacing. Find your favorite reference books that are the most useful to you.  

Some things you can try:

• Check the pacing. Write a chapter outline for the entire book and see if you spot any problems.

• Make a reference list of any unusual names or conventions in your book. This is especially helpful for world-building in speculative fiction. Check the list to make sure you’re being consistent throughout your work.

• Check your character arcs to make sure they’re complete. If your book has subplots, sometimes called layers, make sure you didn’t accidentally leave any unresolved.

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Whether you’re covering the basics or committing to more, don’t let the editorial cycle paralyze you. Do what you reasonably can, and then celebrate your published book!