Does anyone have any tips on finding an editor for your book? Has anyone who went down the self published route become successful without one? I understand its probably for the best to find a good editor, but from a simple search they seem to be very expensive. Is this the norm? Do you have any recommendations on where to find good editors? In my case, I am busy working on a self-help manual that I have almost finished - I find it difficult to get good critique or whether it would do well in the market, but I am sure that it still needs quite a bit of polish - but I am a bit of a perfectionist which can maybe hold me back as well... But if anyone can give their perspective on working with an editor or if they went at it alone, it would be very helpful Thank you very much for your time
I would never publish a book without one. Technical problems are the number 1 reason I don't buy self-published books anymore. Good editors are expensive, yep. If you find a cheap one, it's because they're no good.
I would never think of publishing without an editor. At all. It'd be like hiking Mt. Everest naked. Editors are pricey, but a good editor is worth the money. Depending on the kind of editing you need, I can recommend you to Grant McKenzie, The Kilted Writer. He does developmental editing, and I've linked to a thorough explanation of what he can do for you. Some editors will offer a preview of their work (i.e., they'll edit your first five, ten, etc. pages for free). See if they'll do that for you, so you can get an idea of whether the money is worth it. I personally wouldn't pay an editor in advance, nor would I go with an editor whose work I couldn't preview in some fashion. That's me, and I've been burned enough to have earned my paranoia. But I absolutely would have a professional editor look at my work; I've read enough published carrion from those who chose to skip it.
Ok, I don't understand: what do you mean it's worth the money? Are you saying that you literally receive some kind of return on that investment?
Whether or not it's financially worth it, it's worthwhile to put out the best story you can, so as to hopefully provide the best chance of a financial return. I also consider it a matter of personal pride in my work to use an editor, so I know I've done the best I can to provide my readers with a quality product.
I know a guy who has spent thousands of dollars having his book professionally edited. I won't say who, because the book still sucks, but you can buy it on Amazon right now. I don't even want to quote the number he gave me for the final price tag, but it had four zeros in it.
To be fair... editors aren't magicians, so blaming the editor for a book that sucks is maybe not quite fair.
Sometimes books still suck even after an editor gets a hold of it. Getting an editor is worth it if the editor is worth the money. Spending a lot of money is not a guarantee of success.
I only mentioned the final quality of the book because that is the reason I did not call out the author by name. The problem I have with spending that kind of money on an editor is that it will almost never be financially worthwhile--even if the book turns out great--because the average advance is like five grand, and the average book doesn't earn out its advance, and the cost in this case was significantly more than five grand. Maybe someone could provide readers here with some idea what a fair price might be? Thing is, if you review a thousand words in an hour (I dunno, that's twice as fast as I can write them, so it seems semi-reasonable for napkin-math) and you charge twenty dollars an hour, that comes out to two grand for an average sized fantasy novel. For most people, I imagine that is a fairly ouchful kind of price. Hell, I just dropped $1400 on tires, and I wanted to murder the guy who sold them to me.
To me it doesn't make any kind of sense to approach a professional editor. Yes, you should be submitting the best book you can. But an editor is just some dude who isn't you to look over your work. Maybe a slightly more professional eye, sure, but it's not like there's magic rules of English that you only find out when they teach you the secret editor hand shake. You can get it in shape, you can format your stuff, weed out the typos, fix the punctuation and so forth. It takes effort and it takes time to do it, but you don't need to spend the money for that side of writing. And you definitely don't need an editor for anything else. You might need advice, you might need friends, you might need to hear some hard truths. But you don't need to pay for the privilege. Because what's he going to tell that anyone else can't? What kind of insights can he give you that are so very special and unique? And how do you even know if it's making a difference? How do you know if he's not making it worse? After all, he's suggesting changes to plot or characters or style that you wouldn't have made. And everyone says the changes they want to see are making it better. You don't need to pay for this stuff. You don't. At all. There are so very many unknowns about writing. So much of it is just taste anyway. Why pay to hear what any random person could give you for free, or at most a case of beer. I will say to you what I said to my friends when they went to Amsterdam; a gentleman doesn't pay for it. And even if he does; he treats it with extreme caution when the girl says he's the best she's ever been with.
This seems to add up to the idea that editing as a profession is meaningless, and that if you can write, you're as good as a great editor. And, well, no. That doesn't mean that hiring an editor for self-publishing will pay off, because self-publishing rarely pays off. But the idea that an experienced professional editor can't offer any insights that a random reader couldn't offer? Nope.
I thought he was saying there was no point (to him) in hiring an editor on your dime before submitting to agents/publishers - not that his work would never be edited by an editor?
We aren't talking about an editor hired by the publisher, here; we're just talking about hiring one yourself for a (presumably) self-published book. A self-published book can absolutely go to print without an editor. Edit: I say "presumably self-published" because, if a publisher has picked up my book, I expect them to pay for the editing--and to do it without asking for my input on whether or not I want to "use" one.
As someone who's gone through two manuscripts with a professional editor (who yes was paid for by my publisher), I can say that her input was absolutely unique to the many betas who read the books on the first go-round and offered critique. Certainly no one ever pointed out to me before that my dual POV first book was wildly unbalanced and that I either needed to beef up the second POV or change to single POV. It made such a huge difference and out of the 40-ish people who read the first draft of UTK not a single person suggested or I doubt even thought of it. I also found her to be much more specific in her critiques, and able to more clearly articulate the reasoning behind them. Now that I've worked with a professional editor, if I ever wound up self-publishing I'd definitely lay out the cash for one. I just know it's made my books better in a way that didn't happen using betas.
There's the 'great book inside of me' types, with their manuscript overseen by a charlatan for $5000, or by somebody who lives down the road, went to sixth form and knows her apostrophe's, she'll do it for £500. By and large these people should be protected. Then, publishing houses have editors. The big ones are very clever editors, but the little ones you see with photographs on the internet and bios about how 'I love reading,' and 'pizza,' and 'sunsets' and 'piano Jazz,' they are probably idiots. When I worked among professional subs before the transition[2012]only to Brighton[2012] sub-editors saved me on several occasions - with articles - removing 'wacko' paragraphs and such-like, so my 'my story' read like a decent person had written it. But then more recently, appearing in 'books' or in almost books/anthologies, the editor did nothing, just thought he was a celebrity who owned writers. And on the page I actually did look like an idiot, with had and had and the the and just over & across the pages folios of my masterpiece. So that's an important contribution.
No, I'm talking (and I thought quite clearly) about you paying for an editor before you have any expectation of making money from a book. It's just a bad investment. I have no problems with a publisher having an editor check your work. But as someone looking in from the outside you'll be incredibly lucky for a publisher to take your book when it needs more than a once over.
I must be incredibly lucky then. Both of my books required major surgery for the first set of critiques from my assigned editor. The first one I had to go from dual POV to single POV which was a logistical nightmare, and the second I shredded the entire middle of the book and went back to the drawing board. My experience has thus far been: 1st set of edits: Purge and re-write 25-33% of the book. UTK went from 147K words to 95K words from the first accepted submission to the printed version. 2nd set of edits: Mostly housekeeping; continuity issues stemming from re-writing, responses to pushback on first set of edits, and some picker things that didn't get addressed in the first go-round. 3rd set of edits: Galley editing; very few changes but last chance to do anything before the die is cast. My editor did far, far more than give my books a once-over. She assisted me in changing fundamental parts of my manuscripts to make them more enjoyable to readers. I'm not sure what my publisher paid her, but to me she's worth her weight in diamonds.
Then you are incredibly lucky. The fact that anyone looked at a manuscript more than 100k long is really, really rare.
It wasn't much of a gamble - my publisher's standard guidelines allowed for anything up to I believe 200K words to be submitted. I was going to try to copy/paste the guidelines but the word count verbiage has been removed since Less Than Three is closed to general submissions currently.
The fact that you were submitting to a publisher directly kinda shows it's the exception that proves the general rule. Most people aren't submitting to publishers. Most publishers don't take submissions from anyone but agents. And most agents won't even look at a book that isn't under 100k long. So yeah, you were really lucky. And I wouldn't recommend to anyone they submit a manuscript that needs 50k words cut out of it. I just don't think you need to pay someone to make that happen.
