Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Writers Need Editors or Good Editing (IMHO)

I am so proud of WdC writer-friends whose books I read because they have the best self-published books without any glaring flaws. It was, however, not so where other books were concerned.

Ever since I started reading self-published books on my Kindle, I began to appreciate more, a lot more, the value of good editors. Unless a writer has the eyes of an eagle, sees all awkward passages and errors, and can proofread for herself or himself, his or her work will lack credibility without a knowledgeable editor.

Example: The last novel I finished is written by a writer with a BA in English, an MA in Lit, and another degree in a related field. She also teaches writing privately. (Her bio is at the end of the book.)
Her novel was a long one of the literary genre, the genre I like reading the most. The first half of the book was flawless. But somewhere during the middle, typos, misspellings, slight grammatical errors began to sprout. At one point in one scene, I thought she wrote it while half-asleep and forgot to look it over.
Here is an exact quote with the characters’ names changed. It is a mother and daughter scene:
Clare said, “May I drive you home?”
Clare answered, “I don’t think so.”
She insisted. ‘It’s late. Please let me.’
Clare wasn’t talking to herself either. There are a couple more things like this in the second half of the same book. Never mind the fact that she has written the same scene in two different places and that she likes beating around the bush a lot.

I don’t mean to look down on any one author, but this one is a well-educated person on the very subject she is involved in. Imagine if she needed an editor, how would the rest of self-published writers fare?

Forget the grammar, typos, or an attention slip or two, an editor’s best medicine to an ailing manuscript is to point out the construction flaws, incorrect information, and organization of thought and sequence. A writer may have the best idea, great premise, well-developed characters, but if the scene sequences put readers to sleep and the novel is not presented as impressively as it can be, the writing loses from its positive impact.

Having said that, I checked the editorial services of a popular company for a 50K novel, since NANO is right around the corner and most editorial services charge by word count. Just to give an overall idea the price was $360.00 for only manuscript critique, $843.76 is for line-by-line editing, and $721.99 for proofreading. And, they won’t do the proofreading before the writer goes through the previous two. This company advertises itself as: Fast, Affordable, Professional Editing and Proofreading --Trusted with more than xxx million words

Now who can afford that! Even if we could, should we blindly accept what they say? I don’t think so. After all, the blame or the praise goes to the author.

What to do, what to do, if we can’t afford an editor and couldn’t get the attention of a serious publisher? What a catch-22 situation!

I think we should arm ourselves with information, and check, and recheck several times over with or without any editorial services before deciding to publish.

Even if we did all that, can we be sure our manuscript is at its best? Not really, but at some point, we have to go jump in the lake or rather into self-publishing. Otherwise, we’ll miss the flow of things. I don’t know what the remedy is in the long run, but I think we should be careful, very careful, with our manuscripts.