This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 440th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

Podcast.

So it turns out I couldn't hold off long from diving into edits for my portal fantasy sequel

Dreambreaker. So in I have dived. Although I know there are a couple

realism issues I'm going to have to take care of in the third act. I feel like the first draft is pretty clean

at this point anyway. We'll see what the betas have to say in a few

months for now my major concern as always is tightening up the pros and

trimming my word count I collate an ongoing list of suspect or what are sometimes called glue words like the word that or shrug shoulders instead of just shrugged.

So what I do is run a find replace on all these words replacing them with

themselves but in all caps so I'll be sure to notice them as I'm reading through. It makes my

manuscript look crazy and it creates the need for a lot of retyping as I go.

But it's one of the best ways I know to tighten and trim. I'm hoping to cut upwards of 20,000 words with this technique alone.

So wish me luck.

And now I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast

How to Sell Your Books Without Selling Out. Writers these days don't get to think about just writing.

If you want to learn how to sell your books, you must also think about marketing.

And yet, most writers hate marketing.

Popular marketing wisdom, particularly within the last decade,

says newbie authors should start building marketing platforms

before they're ever published.

Start a blog, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, get active on Twitter, build an email list.

And this is something I'm frequently asked about.

...