Entirely Necessary

So now you know why you need to accept criticism, but now I want to take it one step further. It’s more than just accepting what people say about your work, about than just accepting the fact that some people will not like what you do and others will, or about the fact that some people want to help you better your craft, and others don’t. It’s about making your work better than it could ever have been before—because you could never be your own editor.

Don’t Avoid Editors

I know the thing to do these days is to just go out and get self-published, to do it all yourself so you don’t have to deal with an editor and the so-called mess they’ll make of your novel… but that’s really not the way you should go about things.

If you’re going to self-publish, and you’ve determined that that’s the road you want to go down, then you need to make sure that you get an editor. A lot of self-publishing packages tell you that they come with professional editing, and let me tell you right now, as someone who’s been through that process: they’re lying. They’ll have someone try to edit, but it won’t work out very well, and you’ll be left with a mess of typographical errors that a real editor would’ve caught.

I know, I know, you’ll remind me that I recently told you there are always errors, in every published work. And that’s very true. But there are far more errors found in self-published works than there are in regularly published ones, all because of the editing.

You can’t avoid editors forever. Really. You can’t.

And you shouldn’t. 

At some point, you need to learn that editors really are here for your benefit. And not all of us will charge you an arm and a leg to edit your manuscript.

We’re here to help you, to get your work to a much better place than it is right now. We’re here to point out some errors you might have missed, to make sure you don’t have any plot holes, and to generally ensure that your book will be far better received.

You can’t do all that on your own. You just can’t.

For one thing, as I often say, you’ll never be able to catch every typo you make, and you won’t notice when something doesn’t read right—because you wrote it, and your brain automatically reads it the way you meant it to be, always.

That’s not a good thing! 

We want our readers to not be confused by our work, to understand everything as we meant it to be, not to have to sit there and wonder how this phrase even makes sense in the constructs of the English language. That what editors are here for, to make sure all that confusion gets weeded out, so that everything (or at least, mostly everything) makes sense within your story. 

Remember, it's not the editor who shines when you release an awesome novel. It's you. We're just your backup. 

Our ultimate goal is to be releasing work that the public enjoys, that’s good enough to be picked up by the persnicketiest (yes, I just made a word) of readers, and believe that they’ll enjoy it. Our goal is to get your work to the highest possible level before publication, so you don't have readers coming to you with a list of typos that you need to fix. We want you to release work that people will say is well written, whether they liked the story or not.

Can you honestly say that, without editing?

The answer is no, whether you admit it or not.

It’s blunt, but it’s the truth. You need an editor.

[love]

{Rani Divine}