The obvious answer is that it takes as long as it takes, right? I mean you want to submit a polished romance novel to agents and publishers.
That being said, if you give yourself “forever” to edit and polish your manuscript the cold hard truth is that it might never get published.
And since that’s what this blog and website are devoted to (helping you make a living writing romance) it makes sense that our perspective might be a bit different.
Create a Revision Deadline For Your Romance Manuscript
When you’re writing your book, presumably, you created a writing schedule that included daily writing goals.
For example, 1000 words a day. At this rate you’d have your first draft completed in around 100 days. Pretty good, right?
In order to continue on this very productive path, you’ll need to apply the same approach to your revision process. There are a couple approaches to take:
- Edit/polish a certain number of pages each day.
- Create a revision checklist and create goals for each step of the checklist. For example if one step is to storyboard each chapter then that step would take one day. However, the “read the entire manuscript through once and take notes on changes to make” might take ten days.
- Set time aside each day to edit just like you did to create the first draft.
Revising and polishing your romance manuscript can be just as rewarding, if not more so, than creating the first draft. It’s a time to pull out the emotions and senses and to craft compelling scenes.
My best recommendation is that the revision process shouldn’t take any longer than it took you to write the first draft of your romance novel. If you took 3 months to write the draft then give yourself another 3 months, maximum, to edit and polish it.
And then get your hard work published!