u/BWFoster78

If for some reason you have decided to go with a completely new ad every time you run one instead of, you know, just re-using your best ones and you've run out of creative ideas, I came up with an inspired plan: ask my readers for suggestions.

That worked pretty well as I got one awesome idea I'm working on preparing and a couple of other definite possibilities.

On that note, though, am I an idiot for switching the ads up so much or would it be better to keep using the same one or rotate the best ones or what?

Note that the reference to "Pro" in the title was definitely sarcasm. I am about as far as a pro when it comes to ads as a person could possibly be.

Right now, my writing goals are split between finishing my story and taking care of many, many Amazon pre-launch activities, one of which is editing. I'm spending a lot of time on that task at the moment, and I was just thinking, "Is it worth it? Will this have an impact for readers?"

For me, certain parts of the process absolutely add value:

• Turning a jumbled mess of a sentence into something more readable.
• Improving flow (ex: smoothing an awkward transition or fixing a piece of dialogue that sounds stilted.)
• Getting rid of typos, mistakes, continuity errors, etc.
• Etc.

There's one thing that I do, though, because it's "good practice" but I was just wondering what everyone else thought about its value:

Line editing to tighten prose

One of the first "writing rules" that I learned was that tight prose was good prose. If you could say something in two words instead of three, that was a good thing. Get rid of adverbs. All that stuff.

Obviously, as one grows as a writer, one comes to understand that overediting can lead to loss of Voice, which is a far greater sin than using too many words.

Still, there are certain things that I do that aren't Voice but are just pure, in my opinion, extraneous words. Examples:

• able to instead of could
• people managing to or tending to do stuff instead of just doing stuff (sometimes needed, of course, but not nearly as often as I use them)
• was writing instead of wrote. (Substitute verb of choice for writing; also, again sometimes correct and useful, but I'm self diagnosing myself as using it way too much)
• going to instead of would
• one of the instead of a

Anyway, you should get the point of what I'm talking about... uh, what I talked about... uh... Anyway, hopefully you got the point from that.

So the question: do those kind of tightening edits really impact the reader? And if so, how much?

It's something I've always done for my final draft, and I doubt I'll ever change it. I am quite curious, though, what other people, both readers and writers, thought about the subject.

TIA.

Brian

Channeling my inner Jeff Foxworthy here:

If you read more than 300 chapters of a story, more than 600,000 words, and leave a .5 star rating, you might be an a-hole.

On a huge milestone note, my story now has 25 .5 star ratings. I see a lot of posts celebrating just one, so I think this is a pretty big accomplishment!