Polishing the Story

The publishing process began with editing the text.  Bethany had done a good job on her assignment, so there weren't many spelling or punctuation errors.  However, there was still room for some improvement.

Word Alive provided a professional editor, Kerry, to work with Bethany to hone the wording of the story.  Bethany began by putting her questions in comments in the Word doc containing the text, and sending it to Kerry. Kerry responded with her suggestions, and Bethany and Rebecca implemented some of those and responded with further questions about others.  At each stage, Kerry would create a new version which included the changes everyone had agreed on.

The biggest change made to the text was expanding the ending.  Initially, the story closed with a sentence or two.  Bethany rewrote it to make it about as long as the introduction, so the story felt more balanced. Another significant change was adding a sentence explaining why the three princes suddenly entered the story.  A few other sentences were rearranged or rewritten to make them clearer.

At this time, Bethany and Rebecca also worked on the summary for the back of the book, and the author bio (the sentences about Bethany on the back cover).  They decided not to include an author photo for privacy reasons.

After a few times going back and forth with questions and suggestions, Bethany, Rebecca and Kerry were all happy with the final text, and Rebecca sent Word Alive the official approval to move on to the next stage in the process.