Last time I was writing about the circumstances in which I don’t show writing and today I am going to write about – When to actually show your writing. Unfortunately, the list isn‘t as long as the last one, but it should be useful.
Regrets
There are certain periods of my writing career when more than anything I should have shown my writing to the right people but I hadn‘t and later I regretted not doing it.
Show it to the right people before sending it to an agent, a publisher or an editor
It was probably the biggest mistake with my first novel. After I don‘t know how many drafts I‘ve marked my manuscript as finished and decided to find a publisher for it. Immediately, I‘ve started to send query mails. Not surprisingly, I didn‘t get many replies. Then, I‘ve sent it to a literary contest and my novel was nominated for the best book among almost 200 other novels and short story collections.
Now, I believe that it didn‘t win that competition purely because all of the errors that it had.
However, when I became aware of these errors, it was too late. Being nominated for the best novel opened some doors in the publishing world and I was naive enough to go through the first one. It wasn‘t a good publisher, but I didn‘t want to see that; wanted to see my novel getting published and I rushed the process.
Don’t trust anyone
Despite the fact that the publisher assigned me a proofreader/editor my novel was printed with more than 300 typos and other nonsense mistakes like leftovers of half deleted sentences because she did a poor job and I trusted her. If I had given the manuscript to someone in whose abilities I trust, before sending it to the contest or the publisher, the things would have been different.
Now, all I could do is release an ebook with these typos removed.
Basically, the only occasion when I want to show my writing prematurely is when I want someone to point out the errors which I cannot see.
In what circumstances do you show your work in progress? Tell us in the comments section below.