What does editing entail? (Patreon)

As I'm sure you guys are well aware, I've finished the latest chapter, and I'm sitting down to do my editing. I thought I'd explain exactly what happens, just so you have a better idea.

Each chapter is roughly 30k words, so I've started splitting them in half, and give my editors part 1, while I write the rest of part 2. It works well, because they can point out anything important I might have missed, giving me time to add it to part 2, if I can't fit it into part 1.

They typically give me some immediate feedback after reading through part 1, and two of them will go through picking up missing words, misspellings, punctuation errors and the like. There might be a few minor scene changes at this point, but this first pass only takes me about 30 mins. 

The third editor creates a word doc, and goes through in detail with word change suggestions, and ideas for new scenes. Going through that lot takes me anywhere from 1-4 hours on average depending on the scale of changes. When I've gone through all their edits, I post the revised version onto google docs,

Finally the last editor goes through the entire thing, picking up punctuation and grammar errors. He typically finds between 100-200 separate corrections, so going through those normally takes a couple of hours.

That's how it normally pans out, but sometimes I get their feedback in different orders which complicates things a bit. For the last chapter I ended up inserting a score of new paragraphs based on their feedback, which took most of a day to complete. 

Heavily modifying scenes (especially dialogue!) can be very time consuming, as I have to keep rereading to make sure the dialogue still flows logically. It takes much longer to insert a few paragraphs than just to write new paragraphs! There are lots of other things to watch out for too, like repeated use of uncommon words, and excessive use of adjectives ending in -ly. 

Sometimes a proposed edit can be too tricky to insert into existing scenes, because it will break too much dialogue etc. If that happens, I usually just try and address that point when I start the next part or chapter.

So I hope that gives you a better picture of what's involved. Based on feedback from a Patreon Poll, I occasionally give you a chapter before completing the last grammar/punctuation pass, because at that stage nothing fundamental usually changes regarding the storyline.