Are Professional Editors Useless in Self Publishing? (Part 1)

People are always telling self-publishing authors who dream of making money writing, that that they need to hire professional editors to lift their stories up to a professional level. In most cases this is pure BS. I understand that the big publishers are laying off editors right and left, and that editors need jobs, but well, life is hard. The last thing a self-published author needs to do is to spend money on a professional editor. That money is more wisely spent elsewhere. Like in advertising.

Why? You ask. You did ask, didn’t you? Well, the simple reason is that it comes too late in the game to save the day, if the day needs saving. Editors in traditional publishing have hundreds of manuscripts to choose from. They, and the marketing department, can select from these hundreds, the ones with the greatest potential to sell a lot of copies. However, when a self-publishing author hires an editor, they must work with what that author has written, and by that time, the story's fate is already sealed. So, short of rewriting it, an editor isn’t likely going to make enough of a difference to change this fate.

To understand why this is, you have to go to the head of the production line. If an author is going to be commercially successful, they need to identify a market that has the potential to provide a profitable business for the writer. It doesn’t have to be the largest, but it needs to have a large enough pool of avid book buying readers to provide the potential for selling thousands of copies.

Having identified such a market, an author needs to study what exactly this audience expects in the books they buy. What are the tropes and story beats that all the best sellers in the genre serve up? What is the formula? This is discovered by reading, and studying the bestsellers with an eye to their similarities and structure. Once they have deciphered the formula, they then need to write to that formula, giving it their own distinctive variations, while making sure that readers get what they expect to get.

If an author has done their homework and understands their potential readers – and written a story that meets their expectations for both the story and the basic quality of writing – they shouldn’t need an editor to polish it further. The fact is that if one is writing for avid readers, the literary bar isn’t all that high. Potboilers sell, and always have. Avid readers are not discerning readers. They don’t have the time for being fussy.

I should mention here that we're talking about editing, not proofreading, which is something different. Some sort of proofreading to eliminate typos is a necessity. Polishing prose isn't, if the story meets the expected standard of the genre. Which, if the homework is done, it should.

Plus there are more pressing issues that need a self-publisher's money. The main one is getting readers to notice their books. What good does it do you if you have the perfect book but no one can find it? The money spent on editing is likely better spent on advertising and promotions, which are sad necessities in self-publishing world these days. Without advertising of some sort, one's chances of making more than pizza money in the trade is close to nil. So, in that respect, money spent on an editor is actually counter productive.

Don’t believe me?

Well next week I’m am going to use a concrete example of a professionally edited book that targeted at a relatively small market, namely, YA non-dystopian, non-post apocalyptic science fiction. It’s a market that even big traditional publishers have a hard time selling more than several thousand copies – at best. The book I’ll use is Kitra, by Marcus Gideon. Marcus draws the short straw because he is the most recent advocate of professional editing that I’ve come across. And he happened to provide some ballpark sales figures for his professionally edited book which we can use to get some insight into how much, or how little, professional editing drove sales of his book.

Perfection(ish)

 

I can’t spell. Never could. Still, my attitude is that the only way someone knows that I misspelled a word is that they know the correct spelling and thus the misspelled word did it’s job. It may’ve taken a split second to translate it on the part of the reader, but it still conveyed the meaning of the correctly spelled word. Which is all you can ask of a word. I may’ve used a crowbar to hammer a nail down instead of a hammer but it got job. You gota work with what you got.

I’m not a person who learns by rote and memorization, and there is no way to learn spelling, or indeed the ins and outs of the English language except by rote memorization. And to put it bluntly, the English language is a hopeless clusterfuck. There is no logic in its spelling, and for every so-called rule, there are exceptions, so there are no real rules. No real guides. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the English language is that some people think its unalterably sacred. I find it hard to believe that the gods of the English language handed down the word “nevertheless” to us. (I Googled it to save your the trouble. It likely comes from the Middle English word neverthelater and means notwithstanding.) Nevertheless, I have to believe that at some point some Middle English people just started stringing the phrase “never the later” altogether, whether the high priests of the English language objected or not. And then someone, some time later, just slipped nevertheless into its place. Who knows if the high priest of English objected or not. If they did so, they failed to put a stake through its heart. 

In that spirit, I think I’m going to invent a word myself. A useful word – atleast. Atleast is atleast as useful a word as nevertheless, if not more so. The gauntlet is down. And I don’t care if there’s a red line under it. There’s a red line under “neverthelater” as well. And that’s a good Middle English word.

Given my attitude, one has to wonder how it is that I’m a writer. Or perhaps, how good a writer I am.

I’m okay at it. It’s a journey not a destination, but we’re on the road. As for my lack of qualifications in the English language, well I’ve got a crutch. A computer to do the spelling for me. I hate writing by hand these days. But on a more general note, my attitude is that I am not an automobile mechanic and yet I can drive a car. All the illogical messiness of the English language can stay under the hood, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t need to know it. Sherlock Holmes didn’t want to clutter his head with useless knowledge, like the earth circling the sun, for fear of filling it up with useless knowledge at the expense of useful knowledge. That’s my attitude as well. In the place of rules and diagrams of sentences, I have read maybe two thousand books in the past half century. And  from that experience I have distilled what I think is good writing and storytelling looks like. And I try to apply what I think is good to what I write.

Attitude is one thing. But it takes one only so far. You gotta respect your audience as well.

In 2015 I self-published the three novels I’d been working on during the previous five years, starting with A Summer in Amber. In doing so, I decided to lay my strengths and weakness as a writer out there for anyone to see. It wasn’t a decision that I took lightly. However, I realized that there was no great risk in doing so. If I did made a fool of myself, I’d only be a fool in the eyes of a few, maybe a hundred, strangers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In doing so, I learned a lot. One of my major lesson was I discovering just how blind I am to typos. I read, like most people, what I expect to read. Just as long as the shape of the words more or less match expectations, I'm good to go. And because they were my words, I hardly had to read them at all. As a result, I would give my wife what I considered a clean manuscript to proofread and she’d find five or six hundred or more mistakes. And still not catch them all. And I didn’t help my cause by making revisions after the manuscript had been proofread. So there were a fair number of typos in my first books, though, as I said, many hundreds less that if left to my own devices. This sad fact was mentioned in the early reviews, which was fair enough. However, what was encouraging is that they were, for the most part, still good reviews, so I knew that I’d done the most important thing right. I just had to do other things a lot better.

In the five years since I first published these works, I’ve made many revisions to correct those problems. I had a year’s worth of Microsoft Word that had a more robust grammar checker than the LibreOffice program I use to write. I went through the books I'd written at that time using Word to find mistakes we’d missed. It helped, but the real solution came when some of my readers stepped up and volunteered to send me lists of the mistakes they found when reading my books. And some of them have stayed on to be volunteer beta read for all of my subsequent books as well.

The process is rather eye opening.

My wife, a retired high school teacher who knows a lot more about English than I do, is my first proofreader. And as I said, she finds the first five, six, seven hundred or more mistakes I make. After making corrections, I send the manuscript off to my four or five beta readers. They find an additional 50 to 100 mistakes. They all get the same copy, and yet, there is remarkably little overlap in the mistakes each of them find. It seems that everyone reads a little differently, and each get tripped up by different words. The process, however, delivers a pretty clean copy, and I am ever so grateful for their efforts. I don’t get complaints about all the typos these days, thanks to them.

However, I want to give my readers the best possible experience (within my budget) and I noticed that while typing emails in gmail, it would highlight awkward grammatical phrases, and such. I wondered if Google Docs would do the same thing. So I uploaded my latest book to Google Docs, and sure enough, it worked the same way, finding double words, missing words, and those correctly spelled wrong words that slip in, the its and it’s, where and were, discrete and discreet – my usual suspects.

As a result of this experiment, I’ve spent the past week running all of my works through Google Docs and making corrections that this process found – when appropriate.

I found many things to fix in my earliest works, though almost no misspellings. But in those early works, I wrote in a rather telegraphic style. I wrote them how I heard my characters speaking, and I often skipped little words like “a” or “the” that were almost understood without speaking in speech. And I would think that they’d not be missed, when in the flow. However, this time I put them in.

I found a few other interesting points going through my work. Google prefers that my characters look “at” each other, while I prefer that they look “to” each other, i.e. “I looked at her” vs “I looked to her.” I also found that Google prefers that when a character did something, did another thing, and then says something, it prefers it written as, “I looked down, jumped back, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a snake!” Whereas I prefer prefer to choreograph the action, i.e. “I looked down, and jumping back, exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a snake!’ I kept my way in both cases.

These revised versions of my books are now available in all the bookstores. My Google books now have the 2020 covers as well. If you’ve already read them, it’s water over the dam. But if you have some sitting around yet to be read, swap them out for the new editions, if you can. I’m confident that they are now perfect(ish). At least as perfect as they’re ever going to be – though I will, of course, make any corrections readers send to me.

Bottom line; no looking back now. They are what they are. And I think they’re good enough for me to sleep well at night.