How I edit my drafts to make them ready for a book


In this article I want to share with you how I do the editing of my books from rough first draft to finished version that gets published in a book.

Reduce the pressure to do it perfect

Each principle goes through multiple editing moments. And each moment has a specific focus. This helps me avoid the feeling of pressure that comes when editing:
Shit I have to turn this draft into something that goes in a book and is final! 
Instead by editing one text, or in my case on Service Design Principle, several times at different times the pressure is reduced.

An overview of the editing process

A writing workflow is like anything in life, it evolves with time. Here is how my editing looks like today:

  1. Writing pass: write a first draft as long as it comes.
  2. Editing pass one: reduce and remove the unnecessary.
  3. Editing pass two: continue to reduce, make it accurate and verify the references. Write the citation in in the Harvard style.
  4. Editing pass three: make it smarter and funnier. The more you edit, the more a text can be dry, so I try to add a bit of humor back in the text.
  5. Editing pass four: give it to a professional proofreader to edit and adapt based on comments
  6. Editing pass five: give it to read to community readers and adapt based on comments


A detailed look at one phase

Every phase has more details and steps than what I described just above. For example for the editing pass one I do these things:

  1. Remove everything that doesn't make the story clearer
  2. Put the text in Hemingway editor app to spot too long sentences.
  3. Put the text in Grammarly to remove the biggest english issues

Let's take a concrete example. The principle "Don’t enforce the rule completely" During this first editing pass I was able to reduce by 27% the word count compared to the first draft.

You can see in the image below how the orginal text (on the left) compares to the edited text (on the right) in the Hemingway editor.

As you see, the draft has a lot more highlights from the app that show that specific parts of the text are hard to read.

You can see a detailed comparaison of the two versions in the image below where every change in the text is shown.

Basically, only two sentences stayed the same. Everything else was slightly modified. There are is even full parapgraph that just disappeared.

What's great when you do this multiple editing process, is that you can take a bold decision to remove something, because you know that you'll come back to the text in the future. And if it doesn't make sense when you read it again, then you can come back to the previous version.

As I'm writing the book "Service Design Principles 201-300" in public, you can follow the evolution of of my editing process in the community I've built for this.

Written on March 15th 2022 by Daniele Catalanotto