A.C.E. Writers

If you’re a writer, you may be tempted to just accept your first written project as the best you can do. After all, it is your baby, and nobody wants to change the baby. Right? Not so fast there… If you don’t change the baby, it begins to stink and smell bad (I know, I have lots of experience with this). In fact, if you don’t change the baby, it begins to leak all over everything in sight and eventually, everything it touches smells pretty rank.

And that ain’t peanut butter dripping from the diaper!

Lea Schizas says, “We – writers – want our readers to absolutely fall in love with our books, our storylines, our characters, and impact the readers for a long time.”

The key portion of this phrase is “A long time” because that’s really and truly what we do want. We desire readers who not only love our work, but keep coming back to read what we write for a long time. Oh, yeah, and it’s even better if they send friends!

Writer excellence starts with change.

Any editor will tell you, the first etchings of an article rarely ever hit print. A quality article requires lots of editing and reviewing, rewriting and reworking to achieve publication. Rarely does an article ever come off my desk that didn’t get an edit and at least one rewrite. That’s a minimum. Even those simple quick articles that go to article marketing sites to drive traffic get a cursory edit and rewrite before I hit send. (And honestly, they should probably get more. I’ve found misspellings in those articles after publication.)

There are directives for critiquing and editing articles all over the web. But in reality, the best kinds of source edits come from the writer themselves, right after they write it, when they reread the material out loud for the first time. Any writer will tell you, if you can’t read it out loud and hear a nice flow and rhythm, nobody will read your article.

Achieving your dream means editing.

Once you’ve read it out loud and think it reads well, take your article to the critique group and see what they say. If one of them says they don’t understand… Shut up!!! Don’t explain it. Rewrite it.

Your article should make sense the first time it’s read, without your explanation. It’s okay to take it back to start and rewrite. Every writer has had this experience, most more than once.

An editor can make a real difference.

No matter how talented your writing group is at critiquing, a high-quality paid editor will do you a world of good. They’ll take out all the clichés that just don’t really need to be there. They’ll remove all the superlative words and redundancies, and they’ll even check the spelling that spell checker missed.

The best parts of a paid editor are their knowing advice and understanding of the publication world. The best editors will be able to tell you whether or not your work is publishable from the beginning. Even before they waste 99% of their time and your money reading and editing the work; listen to their advice.

Be certain your words speak well for you.

When the words represent you best, they not only get read, but they drive attention back to you, the writer. In the real world of writing, publishers recognize not only the written work, but the writer behind the words. While a great writer can write many genre, often with different pseudonyms and not be readily discovered, a great publisher can recognize an author’s work in many genre. The secret is in how well the words speak your language.

Jan Verhoeff promotes writing for profit, and even more-so, writers for profit. If you’re looking for interesting projects, great accomplishments, and a way to make a profit from your writing, visit http://writerforprofit.com and learn how to turn your words into cash.

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