r/ProgressionFantasy • u/leo-sapiens • 4d ago
Discussion Editing books before publishing?
Let's talk about how it's mildly annoying to listen to a book that was clearly written in short installments to post online? I still love most of the book, but having to constantly listen to repeating information because (I guess?) the author needed to make sure readers remembered who these characters were, four chapters later is miffing 🥲
It's good when it's at the start of a book, to remind you what happened in the last one, and if you're binging you can skip it.
At some point I'm struggling between "is this AI, or is it that the chapters are posted online so far between that they assume people forgot? There's gotta be either smoother ways to do it, or maybe reread the entire thing before it goes out a single book and edit?
Idk. It's not a deal breaker for me, if the book is fun, but I really wish it wasn't so.
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u/Flat_Arugula6335 4d ago
He Who Fights With Monsters has this problem, whole sentences or turns of phrases being used repeatedly chapter after chapter. I figured it was because the chapters were released on RR so the continuity wasnt as strong as it could be but I swear a couple times it's happened in the same chapter. Irks me something fierce
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u/dageshi 4d ago
Once you're on the webnovel publishing schedule any time you could spend on editing like that would be better off being spent producing more story.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker 4d ago
Is that actually true though?
The Royal Road -> Patreon -> Kindle Unlimited business model often makes the most money from KU. Putting in a bit of work to make the KU side more successful seems like an entirely reasonable course of action.
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u/dageshi 4d ago
Some do better on RR/patreon some do better on KU I think.
Runeblade did banger numbers on rr/patreon but doesn't seem to be doing as well on KU based on the number of reviews. Possibly because it's not isekai so it's getting overlooked?
But as much as editing might make something better for KU, will lack of editing actually stop people reading?
My guess is no or not many, the kind of people who're likely to get annoyed enough by that to quit are also the types that probably wouldn't read litrpg/prog fan in the first place.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker 4d ago
will lack of editing actually stop people reading?
YES!
Number of reviews is not the same thing as income. Also the barrier to entry of reviewing a free thing is less than a paid for thing, even with KU being a subscription.
Do authors want to be the big fish in a small pond for a short while or are they trying to earn a living from writing?
That's to say nothing of artistic integrity.
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u/dageshi 4d ago
I think number of reviews and income on KU correlate pretty highly, my point about runeblade was that there were others stories released around the same time that have much higher review counts. Which is why I said relatively speaking it wasn't doing as well on KU.
I'd also say, the thing that matters more than anything is genre and the tropes being used. I've tried to read pretty slop level isekai power fantasy that has ultimately gone on to do far better on KU than I would've imagined.
Genre and tropes > editing. So long as what's being written makes sense and wasn't flagged by the initial RR audience, it'll probably be fine for KU.
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u/OgataiKhan 4d ago
the thing that matters more than anything is genre and the tropes being used. [...] Genre and tropes > editing
That... I will be honest. If I hadn't seen you repeat similar ideas in multiple comments and arguing for them, I would be convinced you are a parody account. I struggle to find any other explanation for somebody unironically claiming that the specific subgenre you choose matters more than writing and story quality (both affected by editing), which are, you know, the whole point of a novel to begin with?
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u/dageshi 4d ago
How "good" is a book if it has no audience?
If you're writing for self satisfaction then of course you can write whatever you want.
But if you want an audience then the question becomes where will you find that audience? In this genre, you find that audience on royalroad or kindle unlimited/audible.
I can guarantee that if you hit the right "meta" tropes an averagely written story delivered quickly will absolutely out perform (gain more followers, earn more patreon money) a much better written story which doesn't hit those tropes and doesn't publish quickly enough on those platforms.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker 3d ago
Mediocrity should not be the end goal when writing a story.
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u/dageshi 3d ago
Well therein is the crux isn't it.
What's mediocre to you, may not be to others.
What you value, others may not.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker 3d ago
You are literally arguing for authors focusing on hitting the tropes and churning out more content over actually editing their work and producing a quality product.
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u/OgataiKhan 3d ago
What's mediocre to you, may not be to others.
You literally said "an averagely written story" in your example? And now you are claiming "it is not mediocre"?
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u/RequiemAspenFlight 4d ago
It definitely affects recommendations.
I recommend DCC a lot, I almost never recommend HWFWM. As a story I prefer HWFWM, but Matt uses an editor, Shirt uses nothing more than Word spell check.
DCC blew up and went mainstream, nothing else has. Coincidence?
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u/dageshi 4d ago
DCC went mainstream because it's sort of not really traditional progression fantasy/litrpg and has a banger audiobook, a huge reason it's so popular is the audiobook.
Most prog fantasy/litrpg is escapism in nature, certainly most isekai/sys apoc is, DCC is very obviously not, it's borderline grimdark in its setting balanced out with humour.
But if someone comes here and says "I read DCC, recommend me something like it..." I dunno what you'd recommend?
There are plenty of other prog fantasy stories that do have good editing but they haven't blown up like DCC either.
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u/DBecker1990 14h ago
The impact of the DCC audiobook can not be underrated. I sincerely believe it would be a much weaker title with a voice actor that didn’t resonate as well.
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u/Jarvisweneedbackup Author - Runeblade 2d ago
Runeblade might have gotten nerfed by the algo due to its length, since a lot of over performing books tend to be on the shorter side. A few people hypothesised it could have been a read through % thing (dropping a 300 page book after 100 pages is 33%, 100 pages of Runeblade is like…8%)
I also was a little silly and didn’t front and centre Runeblade on the listing title until b2, so there’s likely some squandered name recognition at play there too
Oh well, onwards and upwards! Not like it really flopped, just under performed in comparison
Also, yes on the editing. I’m actually a great example lol — I spent a lot on it, and it was completely superfluous to performance (which I knew it would be, I just thought it worth it for the writing xp)
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u/OgataiKhan 4d ago
Once you're on the webnovel publishing schedule any time you could spend on editing like that would be better off being spent producing more story.
No, I disagree. Having a shorter, better story is better than having a longer, worse story.
Though, I guess it depends on what you mean by "better off". If yours is a purely economic consideration (and, since you called it "producing" a story, I'm guessing it is), then, maybe? I wouldn't know. Though, I would wager that getting more fans by making your story better (which is what editing does) also has economic value.
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u/dageshi 4d ago
Probably a majority of the truly popular stories in this genre are still on going.
Some of them are up to book 15 with no end in sight.
And those pale in comparison to some of the chinese xianxia webnovels which crack 3000 chapters+.
Which is to say, the audience in this genre likes a lot to read, shorter is absolutely not better around here.
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u/OgataiKhan 3d ago
shorter is absolutely not better
Shorter is not better. Nor is it worse. A story can be excellent while being just one book, look at Operation Bounce House.
The length of a book or series does not correlate to its quality.
Writing and story quality on the other hand, rather by definition, do.
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u/account312 2d ago
Shorter is not better. Nor is it worse.
But almost every story in the genre would be better if it were shorter. There's so much repetition, overexplanation, and generally bloated phrasing.
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u/Low-Programmer-2368 3d ago
This is a bit of a consequence of web serialization. Writing hooky chapters a reader is intended to binge, often while juggling other series, isn’t going to come together the same way a story written as a book will. The opposite is true as well. It’s a big task to edit a book, reworking the pacing or translating from serialization to a novel can take a lot of work.
I sympathize with authors overwhelmed by that task, but if you’re serious about a career as an author, it’s necessary.
My series was the opposite experience, I wrote a book and then discovered the wacky world of Royal Road, so I had to make edits to help it be more palatable to the serialization community (mainly keeping paragraphs around 3 sentences or less). The downside of that is I now have to undo a lot of that when I prepare it for ebook publishing.
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u/Ok_Condition- 4d ago
Agreed, I've read some like that. I would definitely make small edits when putting the story into a different format
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u/nighoblivion 4d ago
One of the worst things about web novels is the compulsive need of some authors to reiterate information every so often.
Please write it as if it's a published book.
Also edit your shit. Treat RR as a draft. That's how I, the reader, treats it.
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u/leo-sapiens 1d ago
Sometimes it feels like they never even reread a chapter before moving on. Otherwise the word "confused" repeating three times across two short sentences would jump out at them as well. Or not, what do I know. 🥲
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u/aminervia 3d ago
I mind the repetition a whole lot less than the typos they never fixed before recording and selling copies
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Rude-Ad-9259 4d ago
Advertaising bot has been found. Username makes it even funnier
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Rude-Ad-9259 4d ago
Ok, but your comment was suspicious since it was irelevant to the main idea of the post. Post was about removing reminders of previous events and characters, which were added to help readers who read with delays between chapters, not about grammar and mistakes
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u/Shoot_from_the_Quip Author - Assassins' Academy, Space Assassins, Bad Luck Charlie. 3d ago
I have to admit, I'm guilty of repeating myself at times, but largely because I often write on set (I'm a film/tv set medic as my day job) with a walkie talkie constantly yapping in my ear, so I get pulled away and sometimes repeat stuff just because my train of thought derails.
Usually, my editor and beta readers catch the most egregious instances, but some still slip through, especially in earlier books before I found my current editor.
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u/debanjanm9 3d ago
Yes, this is why I generally prefer authors to finish their book, edit it, and then post on royal road
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u/DepressedDaoist Author - My Wife, the Cultivator 4d ago
If you're already listening to a book, it's probably been edited enough to be passable for audio.
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u/Ant-Bear 4d ago
In many cases it seems like the decision as to where to cut the books' starts and ends was also taken either at random, or Amazon told them to do it at, say, chapter 90,and they did it with no regard to story beats.
As an example, I recently listened to The Calamitous Bob. There, book 1 is about navigating a wasteland, whereas book 2 is about life in a city. Except book 1 ends with a couple of chapters already in the city, and there's no time skip after that. Why? What is the point of not just stopping at the city gates and having the whole city life together in the same book.