Pay for an editor or skip it?

Personally if I wanted pro advice I'd rather hire a publishing professional (i.e an editor) than sign up to a course probably taught be someone who has never published anything, and advice from fellow students will just be novice advice again.

 

Every publisher I've ever worked with was very eager to edit submissions themselves. Small presses to the bigger houses and with short stories, novellas, novels, etc . . . I haven't seen a single one that isn't this way. So really, you're asking if you should hire Editor A to get in the door of Editor B. (Where A has no choice, but B does with a vengeance.) And I guess that depends on your writing, but you should absolutely get another pair of eyes to read through your submission. You want as many obvious issues gone as possible. The publisher isn't there to teach you form, and some of them get irritated if there's a lot to fix. You'll die in the slush pile if, mechanically, the piece is a disaster.

If I were you I'd submit your novel to one of the peer critique sites online. You'll have to crit in return, but that can be fun. Just be aware that much of the advice is suspect. There's a lot of 90-day-novel approaches bandied about. The main thing you want is every possible typo eradicated along with tweaks for concision. Keep an open mind with advice, but know when to hold your ground on edits too.

No matter how much you edit, when your publisher gets your work, you will be revising like you never have before. Just polish as much as you can.