Getting a Novel Edit Right

I published my first complete novel in September of 2024, so why am I busy with a novel edit now?

While I am extremely product of what I accomplished in writing and finishing the novel The Seventh Kill, I wasn’t done. For the most part I am happy if it remained as it was.

But, even as I was in the process of publishing the book I had trouble figuring out where to position it in the market. What exactly was this as a novel?

This confusion on my part could be seen in the variations in cover design I tried out just to get it to be right for the book. For the record, I still did not get it right and there is new cover waiting in the wings.

Reasons why I need a novel edit

Here is just a few contradictory elements about the novel:

• The novel has no single protagonist. It does not even have just two. It has a whole police force on the one side and a daughter trying to prove her father’s innocence on the other side.
• The story has a number of murders, but it is not a mystery as such. The investigation part is too perfunctory and the villain is revealed as much as discovered.
• The thriller elements are the strongest but even here there may be an issue with spreading the suspense between too many characters.
• The story has many hooks that could lead to a possible trilogy, or even longer series, but I never planned any of that and hoped to write it as a standalone novel.
• It is not quite a historical although in the conception it does take place in a city similar to 1900 Eastern-European facsimile.
• It is not quite fantasy because although there are spirits and magic it is down-played in a way that you could call low-fantasy.

So, what do you do with a quasi-historical fantasy murder thriller with an ensemble cast?

Well, for myself, you pull if from publication and try and polish off the rough edges and focus the points it does have so that you get a story that you can at least describe in less than a thousand words.

Re-editing for Re-publication

I have done a thorough and granular analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of The Seventh Kill. At the moment in my novel edit I am working through all the changes that I need to make. There are a number of scenes to merge into each other. I have minor storylines to integrate, deleting scenes and integrating threads into bigger narratives. I have three characters I am eliminating, merging their actions and elements together into other characters. And I have a lot of loose threads that I want to tie off to ensure that it is indeed a standalone novel with a satisfying conclusion.

On the complete outside it is less than a month’s worth of work. But that assumes I do not get distracted by anything else, which I tend to allow myself to do way too frequently.

So, no promises there.

If you do want to be updated on when the novel edit will be done, and it will be republished, then the best advice I can give you is to sign up for my newsletter.