Indie Book Collective discussion

Melody Gatto (Tanger_chick58) | 1 comments Hi everyone! Melody here, I'm a new indie writer. I self published my first book this past June. I used a editor and she helped me realize that I had a habit of head-hopping, and I did my best to fix that in the story before I released it. I thought I had it, but one review so far said I still did it.
I want to perfect my writing. I want to use any constructive criticism to only become better.
My editor told me if you are switching POV you need to make a break to make it clear who is talking. I tried very hard to only break once a chapter, so most chapters have each character's POV.
I know I am not the greatest at spelling or grammar, but that is why I used an editor.
I have concerns about this review that I posted below. She still gave me a 4 out of 5, but I want to make sure I understand the POV problem she is addressing. I looked up a lot of info about third person omniscient and third person limited. But if anyone can shed more light on that topic, I would be appreciative. I can post or attach a sample of my book if anyone wants. It is out and published, but I'm publishing a second book in October and want to make sure what this review really meant, and how to avoid this in book #2. No one else has brought this to my attention and I'm interested in more reviews to see if anyone else points this out.
For now I will go do research on these two POVs while I await comments, suggestions and help.
Thanks everyone!


The writing style is simple and easy to read for the most part. The only thing that threw me was that the story has head hopping, otherwise known as third person omniscient, and also has breaks in the middle of scenes. These types of mid-scene breaks are usually reserved for stories told in third person limited as a signal that the POV has switched from one character to the other, so they felt unnatural and unnecessary to me in a third person omniscient story.

Hi Melody!

The way I've always understood it, third person omniscient is almost like simultaneously knowing what all the characters are thinking at the same time, while third person limited is strictly following one character. What seems to be throwing off the reviewer is that you mixed the two in a way that seemed to limit the "omniscient" part of it, or at least made it somewhat confusing.

As far as "breaking" - are you breaking within a chapter? Or is each chapter a switch in POV? I think it could get confusing to have more than one POV per chapter, and that might be what the reviewer is talking about. If you are, you might consider putting visual cues to swap POVs. I write mainly from the first-person perspective, but I like to follow more than one character. To avoid confusion, I use chapter breaks and certain graphics (MS Word has a nifty little sun symbol I like to use in my short stories).

Hope I was able to help at least a little!

Katheryn wrote: "Hi Melody!

The way I've always understood it, third person omniscient is almost like simultaneously knowing what all the characters are thinking at the same time, while third person limited is str..."

Okay, I can see that I may have done that. I tried to tell it omniscient, but that first resulted in head hopping. So when I went back and tried fixing that, I probably made it more limited. Yikes.
I did put breaks in, I used **** . I had tried to have half of the chapter her POV and half of it his, with that break in between.
Before I started writing about two years ago, the last time I even thought about any of this was high school English class...lol. So it is wonderful to have places like this to talk to people about it.
You were helpful, Katheryn :)
Part of me wants to go back and read it, but since it is published and out there, I should maybe concentrate on the new one I'm getting ready to edit. I might ask my editor if I did that (if she didn't mark it already)