Many self-published
authors believe that they can produce a polished product completely on their own. While
this isn't a sales pitch (look at me, I'm an editor, I can solve your dilemma) I
am going to draw attention to a phenomena. No one can see all the flaws in
their own writing, especially in a book length manuscript. These words have
become as familiar to you as your own skin after the second or third time through;
after all, they sprung from you. In a
very real way, they are you. You start reading a sentence with the intention
of looking at it with an eye for errors, and instead fall into the sentence you
knew you wrote, rather than the one on the page. We all do it.
There are those techniques we developed in school, when we were on deadline with a paper, and couldn't find someone at 2 a.m. to read our material. Perhaps it was playing around with font sizes, or reading every single word out loud (perhaps even with a funny accent, have I revealed too much about myself?). However, can these techniques work consistently over the span of an entire novel, when every word is as familiar as your own skin?
Having others read it can help, but you have to trust that they know their grammar rules, and can give you the feedback you want and need. If you are surrounded by people with English Literature degrees, willing to read your work, then you are a lucky writer. But best be sure you pay the investment they are making in your work somehow. Take them out to dinner, wash their car, or some other favor, because if you are getting good feedback from them, then they are investing a long time into your book. And even if you have the ideal collection of beta readers, have you gotten the sort of feedback you want? Are you sure that, in their donated time, that they have caught all the errors that could turn your readers off.
And here, we arrive at last, to the part you saw coming from the beginning: editors. But, I hear you say: "Editors are so expensive? How can I afford it?" But, I would wager that you have also ended up buying a poorly edited book, and been tossed clear out of the reading experience (if you could ever settle into it) every time you ran into a particularly bad sentence. Perhaps such an experience has led you to quietly return the book, or, even worse, loudly leave a bad review. A reader's perception of the worth of your book, or your brand as an author, can be lost very quickly this way.
There are those techniques we developed in school, when we were on deadline with a paper, and couldn't find someone at 2 a.m. to read our material. Perhaps it was playing around with font sizes, or reading every single word out loud (perhaps even with a funny accent, have I revealed too much about myself?). However, can these techniques work consistently over the span of an entire novel, when every word is as familiar as your own skin?
Having others read it can help, but you have to trust that they know their grammar rules, and can give you the feedback you want and need. If you are surrounded by people with English Literature degrees, willing to read your work, then you are a lucky writer. But best be sure you pay the investment they are making in your work somehow. Take them out to dinner, wash their car, or some other favor, because if you are getting good feedback from them, then they are investing a long time into your book. And even if you have the ideal collection of beta readers, have you gotten the sort of feedback you want? Are you sure that, in their donated time, that they have caught all the errors that could turn your readers off.
And here, we arrive at last, to the part you saw coming from the beginning: editors. But, I hear you say: "Editors are so expensive? How can I afford it?" But, I would wager that you have also ended up buying a poorly edited book, and been tossed clear out of the reading experience (if you could ever settle into it) every time you ran into a particularly bad sentence. Perhaps such an experience has led you to quietly return the book, or, even worse, loudly leave a bad review. A reader's perception of the worth of your book, or your brand as an author, can be lost very quickly this way.
As a self-published author, you should be
thinking of ways to establish your book's authority within the mind of your
reader. The judgment of your brand does not end at the point of sale. You want
your reader not only to keep the book, but to rave about it to her friends and
family, to give it to people for gift-giving occasions, to post it all over her
social media space. Making sure that your prose is finely polished and cleaned,
or that your structure is perfectly honed to play with your particular
genre audience, is a good way to try to capture that lightening in a bottle.
You want to bring the best product possible to market.
I know it can be a struggle to let someone else touch, editorially, what is essentially an extension of you. Every suggestion can sometimes feel more like a critique of you as the person then the work as a text. It is alright to feel anxious about that. You may want to cling to the idea of the lone writer, tapping away on her typewriter, creating in a safe and lonely space, rather than to potentially let someone else help you tweak your creative process. However, know this: a good editor will not rip the creative reigns from you. We may suggest ways in which the story might be improved, points which it may be weak, or point at characters that may be falling towards stereotypes, but you are the author. It’s your universe; we just want to help you communicate it clearly. No one needs to go it alone.
I know it can be a struggle to let someone else touch, editorially, what is essentially an extension of you. Every suggestion can sometimes feel more like a critique of you as the person then the work as a text. It is alright to feel anxious about that. You may want to cling to the idea of the lone writer, tapping away on her typewriter, creating in a safe and lonely space, rather than to potentially let someone else help you tweak your creative process. However, know this: a good editor will not rip the creative reigns from you. We may suggest ways in which the story might be improved, points which it may be weak, or point at characters that may be falling towards stereotypes, but you are the author. It’s your universe; we just want to help you communicate it clearly. No one needs to go it alone.
