Developmental Editors and Indie-Publishing

I'm going to say it up front. Publishing is a business. A very risky business. So if you're not certain that the revenue from the book you're publishing is likely pay for a developmental editor, you should not hire one. A developmental editor is someone who goes through the story and tells you where to change it to make it "better."  A developmental editor's value, at least in indie-publishing, is minuscule. And considering that they will likely charge from one to more than three thousands dollars for their work, unless you have a large enough established readership that you confidently expect will cover this expense, you're likely never see any return on that investment. Spending this sort of money on developmental and/or line editing without a booming self-publishing business, is simply a very poor business decision. In my opinion. As I said, publishing is a very risky business, and investments in it need a thoughtful consideration of facts, not dreams, and any money spent, spent very prudently at the scale of expected sales.

Writing, unlike publishing, is an art. Stories are a work of art, created by their author(s). This work of art can be, and almost always is, turned into a product in the hope that it will sell. The job of the editors is use their expertise to re-shape a work of art into the most commercially appealing product possible. In traditional publishing a team of editors work on the cream of the manuscript crop, i.e. manuscripts culled from the thousands submitted to agents, vetted by the agents, and then selected by acquiring editors. Still, they only manage to produce one profitable product out of every three books they publish. And how much of that success might well be attributed to its promotional budget is an open question. This is not to say that editors are completely incompetent, it is simply very hard, even for professionals, to know what readers will like. Yourself-edited, self-published book is as likely to commercially succeed as a professionally edited self-published book, i.e. statically very unlikely.

A "well edited" book is like a tree that falls in a forest. No one will ever know it is well edited, unless they somehow discover and read it. For this to happen,  thousands of impressions are needed just to get a potential reader to click on the cover, read the blurb, and perhaps, read a sample before buying it. Only if, or when, they get to the sample pages will editing ever have a chance to play a role in making a sale. Thus, money spent on getting the book seen is a far more effective way of making sales than thousands of dollars spent on editors.

Given how late in the sales process any effects of editing might have on influencing sales, there is no compelling case that it is needed at all. Your work, your vision, is just as likely to succeed as an editor's. With books you never know what will click with whom.

These days, in traditional publishing, authors usually get only one chance to prove to their publisher that they're potentially a bestselling author. This is not the case in indie-publishing.

The beauty of indie-publishing is that, unlike traditional publishing, you have as many chances as you care to take in chasing commercial success. There's a very simple reason for this; on average, only several dozen to a hundred readers will ever buy and read most indie-published books, be they good or bad. A hundred readers out of a million potential readers gives you a lot of headroom to make mistakes and a chance to get better over time, without coming close to exhausting your potential readership. And the best way to get better is to write, publish, write and publish, again, and again, learning from your mistakes and any feedback you might get along the way. And then, when you reach the point where you can look back and find yourself embarrassed about your first book, you can unpublish it. In the meanwhile, you've been building a back catalog for readers to explore and buy, when the day arrives when your newest book sells more than a hundred copies. When you've made it.

Thus, it's indie-publishing's very long odds of commercial success that allows an author the freedom to write their story the way they want to write it, without compromises to conform to some "professional" editor's opinion. I strongly believe you shouldn't give up that artistic freedom. Who is to say that being different is any less effective than being a copy of last year's successful books? Fashion moves on.

Advocates of using editors often try to make authors feel that they are betraying readers and their fellow indie-authors if they don't get a "professional" editor to polish up their story. Never mind that anyone can set up shop as a "professional freelance editor." There are no bar exams for editors that they need to pass in order to put out a professional editor shingle on the internet. Who knows what your "professional editor" knows about editing.

Advocates of professional editors will also point to popular authors who, they say, grew too big for editors and taking their advice, so that their books suffered for it. Authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson are examples of whom they say produced bloated work as a result. What they don't mention is that while some readers might find this the case, there are likely as many or more readers who think those "bloated" stories are wonderful just as they are. You can never please every reader, and shouldn't try. 

So don't be afraid. It's okay, indeed, desirable, to create your story, your way, no matter how quirky it might be. Remember the abysmal success rate of agents & editors in the traditional space. You really can't do worse by doing it your way. 

Now, by all means produce the best book you can. Get all the feedback on your story that you can from spouses, family, friends, critique partners, and beta readers if you have any doubt about your story. Produce as clean a copy as you can, using the built in spelling and grammar checks, as well as free, or paid (for a month) grammar checkers like Grammarly. But, whatever you do, keep your book uniquely yours. That's its greatest value. Don't let its uniqueness be eroded by someone's idea of making it more marketable. The numbers tell the story; editors have no magic to make a book better and more salable. And when it comes to indie-publishing, it's a very different market, with different readers and reader priorities, so that hiring traditional publishing editors, and mimicking traditional publishing standards is almost certainly a recipe for missing the mark in indie-publishing.

I believe that authors should keep the "self" and "indie" in self-publishing and indie-publishing.

The inspiration for this post came from watching a small publisher/author's YouTube video several weeks ago. In his list of "lies authors tell themselves that will destroy their careers," he listed not hiring a professional developmental editor as one of them. It seems that we're too close to our work to see it's trash. Then last week, he posted another video, where he made the case even stronger - despite the fact that he doesn't feel the need for a developmental himself. (Is he telling himself a lie like the rest of us?) In any event, his advice seems to be a do as I say, not as I do. He then went on to say that cost of editing should be no excuse. Save up for years, if need be. No mention of the steep odds of success in indie-publishing. And in this video he freely admitted that he was acting as a gatekeeper to keep the riffraff, the "bad" books out of the market - something a holy mission for him. He also admitted that he sees himself and his small press a traditional publisher, so his mission seems to be keeping indie writers out of publishing, or to bankrupt them as quickly as possible, should they take his advice and hire expensive editors. All of which struck me as pretty self-serving. I don't think it is in the best interest of aspiring indie authors to follow his advice, since he never addresses the sad truth of indie-publishing; that tens of thousand books are released every month and only a tiny fraction of them will sell a hundred copies or more. Most will lose most of the money the authors spend on publishing their books.