To Edit or not to Edit

One of the greatest quandaries facing any author, especially one attempting the self-publishing route, is whether or not to hire an editor to review and critique their novel. Many believe their work is good enough to not require the services of an experienced editor, and that they are more than capable of fixing the errors within their manuscript by themselves. I’m here to tell you they’re right……. well to a certain extent. While some are more than able to find the grammatical errors dispersed throughout their story, it takes an incredibly trained eye to find errors with the characters, plotline, and overall flow of the novel. This is a problem that nearly every author will fail to solve on their own, and there are two simple solutions. Find a dozen or so well-educated individuals with a large amount of reading experience that are willing to not only read, but critique your work, or you can just take the easy route and find an editor.

From my perspective, the purpose of an editor is to make things less complicated for the author. Sure, you could go around asking everyone you meet to read your book and give their feedback, but at that point you might as well just publish it anyway. When it comes down to it, the choice of whether or not to find an editor for your novel is really a choice of what is the cheaper option for you in the long run. Sure, editors cost a good chunk of money to hire, sometimes they charge in the thousands to review a manuscript, but they can also help you to make your book easier to digest which means more people will be clamoring to purchase it. It’s nearly impossible to tell which of these paths is the better one, and it’s quite possible that each can be better for different authors, but I have some advice that can help make the decision a little bit easier.

While it can be a very beneficial decision to hire an editor to dive head on into your manuscript and pick apart every little detail, you don’t necessarily need to hire someone to review every aspect of your novel. There are many different kinds of editing, developmental, manuscript evaluation, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Suffice it to say that many of these types of editing can be done on your own. If you feel grammar, spelling, and sentence structure are your strong suit then copyediting is a process that you could possibly do on your own and save a bundle of money. If you are better at understanding the flow of the novel and how well each sentence, paragraph, and chapter ties together then you don’t necessarily need to hire a line editor.

I personally decided to hire an editor to just do a complete manuscript evaluation, a sort of overall critique about how good the novel is, and while I might decide later to hire someone to do a more thorough review of my book, for now I feel confident that I chose the right path for me. By the way a great website that I found to not only determine what type of editing is best for your novel but also to find and hire editors to complete that specific type of editing is www.reedsy.com. The website is set up so that you can message multiple editors with the type of editing that you want them to preform as well as an excerpt from your book and some personal information. They respond with requests for additional information if needed and how much they will charge to complete the task. I stepped into the editing process of my novel feeling very overwhelmed, but this website really helped alleviate some of the anxiety.

I am by no means an expert in the process of editing a novel, or even determining if a book is in need of editing, but I have always been exceptional at finding the pros and cons of different paths. This is a skill that I highly recommend you develop if you plan to pursue self-publishing, or any kind of publishing for that matter. There are many decisions you will have to make, and if you are constantly fretting over which route you should take to get your book published, then you will find misery in what should be an enjoyable experience. No matter what decisions you face, keep your head high and your spirits up and even if you make a wrong decision, learn from that experience. Let me know what your editing process has been like. Have you breezed past it no problem, or is it the thing keeping you up every night as you wrack your brain trying to figure out the best way to proceed? Share your feedback and happy writing out there.