Brandon, my husband, had given his book to one of his co-workers at his day job to read through and give him some feedback. She has read a lot of fantasy type novels, so she is a great person to get feedback from. Obviously it took her a while to read it and make all her red marks. Well, while we were on vacation in Hawaii, she had a friend come to visit her. This friend actually works at Scholastic. So she gave the book to this Scholastic rep to read and just see what she thinks. We know it's in first draft form and obviously needs some editing done before we even thought of sending it out. But it would be nice to see if she thinks the concept is something that publishers would be interested in reading.
The scholastic rep read through it - not reading the entire thing, basically skimming sections of the book. Obviously she said that it needs some more editing and tweaking. That the beginning needs a lot of work. She said that it was like two different people wrote the beginning and the end. His writing got a lot better at the end. But she said it has potential. That if he edited it a bit more, that she probably has a few people who would be willing to look at it.
Yes! That's such an exciting statement! Getting someone to look at the book is going to be the hardest thing. We can send it out to as many publishers as we can think of, but it will usually just sit on someone's desk. I'm not exactly sure how to make it stand out to make sure someone at least reads through it. That way, even if they don't want it, we can get feedback on it. So this was very exciting news!
And the best thing, is that his co-worker just gave him back all her edits too. And not only did she fix some of the language to read a little easier, but she also gave some overall concept advice. Things like making sure he has the tense the same throughout. Making sure there are reasons why certain things occur - and if she's asking a question, then other readers will too - so making sure to answer some of those obvious questions. She gave some really good input. Now he just needs to go through and think about it all for a little while and then start editing.
After he edits this, we'll probably give the second draft out to a couple people to get some more feedback and from different people and ages. I'm excited! It feels like he's really writing a book now, instead of just typing for hours on end in the office! We're getting so much closer. And once those edits are all completed, then comes the question: Try standard publishing or Self-publishing?
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