#0022 My Top Five Mistakes Writing a Novel (To Date)

I’ve been working on my first novel for over two years, and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of that time was spent figuring out what works for my writing process. I’ve developed a guide to help me avoid the mistakes I’ve made, and you can find it in another blog post. It’s called the Nine Draft Process. But we’re not here to talk about the fruit of my trails. We’re here to talk about my mistakes. Thankfully, we don’t have enough time to talk about all of them today. Here are the biggest five I’ve made to date (I still have time to make more mistakes).

5. DOUBLE SPACING DISASTER

Coming in at number five, we have the DOUBLE SPACING DISASTER of 2021.

During the adolescence of Alexander (me), I had a typing class in school. This was one of the most useful classes for me, looking back. Even before I started writing my first novel, I’d type multiple emails each day for work. I can type quickly and accurately because of the rigorous training of that class. Thank you, American education system. You got something right.

You’re wondering where the mistake is at. Well, my friend, they taught me to double-space after the period ending a sentence. And I was outstanding at double-tapping that spacebar. Turns out, typing standards have changed, and now, we single-space after the period ending a sentence. I had about 95k words in my manuscripts. I don’t have the exact number, but I can confirm that’s a lot of periods that needed fixing.

4. RANDOMLY ADVERTISING

In fourth place, we have RANDOMLY ADVERTISING.

Back in the beginning, I started with only a Facebook account. I thought I could randomly promote a post and add a few more follows to my page. I didn’t really have any plan. Well, I’m not rich. ZanderverZ isn’t backed by someone that has a lot of extra money sitting around. Every dollar counts. Over a few months, I spent around $300 on random promoted posts on various platforms and got maybe seven more followers on Facebook. That's a high cost for such a low conversion. I’ve since learned that marketing is an art. You have to study it to learn it.

3. NAME GAME

At third place, we have the NAME GAME.

Nearly every character in my novel started with a different name. As if it wasn’t complicated enough, matching dates and events within my fictional town, I changed the name of almost every character at least once.

When I first started the novel, ages ago, I used the names of people I knew. As I continued to write, the fantasy story shaped into a dark fantasy story. It didn’t feel right putting people I knew in some of these situations. So I changed about 50% of the names. Then I later change another 25%. Then I later changed about another 15%. It was a terrible editing mess. I’ll never do that again.

2. DOUBLE HIRING PROOFREADERS

The second biggest mistake I’ve made (to date) was DOUBLE HIRING PROOFREADERS.

In case you didn’t know, I’m new to all this. I knew I bad english sometime. It hurt just type that, but it’s true. We all make mistakes. With that knowledge, I hired a proofreader. I shopped around a good bit, and quotes were expensive across the board. I was concerned.

I looked at the end of my list. The last item was a website called Reedsy. It exceeded my expectations. I could get quotes from multiple professionals, and they weren’t ridiculously expensive. The prices were so reasonable that I hired two proofreaders at once. One could be a dud. I wanted to mitigate that risk.

They both did an excellent job. The problem was that I had to change my manuscript based on information from two different edited sources. When I made changes based on one document, it would be difficult to compare to the other document. Page numbers wouldn’t match and some sentences would be different because of changes made from only one source. It was a minor nightmare, but still a time-consuming event.

1. PREMATURE FORMATING

Now for my biggest mistake. Drum roll, please. My biggest novel writing mistake to date was PREMATURE FORMATING.

Oh boy, I lost so much time here. I purchased a formatting and writing software called Atticus. It’s excellent for formatting, but it didn’t work well for me writing and editing.

As soon as I got the software, I moved my manuscript into it. I also looked at the formatting options and formatted my book into a ready to publish PDF for my alpha readers. It made sense that they’d catch bad page breaks and words that weren’t aligned well. They caught a few of those items, and they also caught some other stuff. A very helpful bunch, they were.

As fate would have it, I could not effectively make those changes in Atticus, so I exported it back to Word. When I was getting ready to send my book out to beta readers, I moved it back into Atticus and format it into a ready to publish PDF once again. I thought the beta reader changes would be minimal, but after I got feedback, I realized I needed a professional proofreader. Turns out professional proofreaders want a Word document, not a PDF. So back to Word I moved the manuscript. I may have neglected to mention that each time I moved the manuscript back into Word, I had to reformat the text headers to align them properly and a few other things.

Over writing this novel, I likely formatted it about three or four times because of poor planning. Each time took multiple hours.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my mistakes. I haven’t. Who knows, maybe you can learn from them.