So it turns out books on editing and revising are mostly for speeches, dissertations, and essays.

If there’s a book out there solely on the revision process for a novel, I had trouble finding it. Maybe it’s too narrow a market—maybe too few people actually finish their first novel and then need help revising it?

None-the-less, there’s plenty of online articles to find. And most books on writing have a chapter or two devoted to revision. So I’ve been reading some of those, and I’ve found:

Editing is the process of rearranging words, correcting spelling mistakes, and adding punctuation where needed. (Generally, you want to revise first, edit second. If you aren’t saying what you want to say in the first place, rearranging words and adding punctuation is arbitrary.)

Revising is the re-analysis of your plots, characters, rewriting sections for clarity, axing entire sections that are unnecessary (no matter how much you fell in love with them), organizing your scenes correctly, ensuring your facts are accurate, studying the smoothness, balance, and consistency of your prose and dialogue—And most importantly, ensuring you fulfill every promise you made to the reader….

For example, if you wrote about a character getting murdered early-on, and then all the characters are trying to figure out whodunnit, you are making a promise to the reader.

Superficially, that promise is: “I will eventually show you who the murderer is.” 
But really, it’s: “Try to out-think me. I promise you that, by the end of this book, the answer will be a surprise.” 

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I’m still keeping an eye out for any books on the novel revision process. In the meanwhile, I did find a free E-book called After the First Draft, which can be downloaded at www.darcypattison.com.

I’ve only read half of it so far, but it seems to be pretty good.