Land a Publisher & Sell Tons of Books?
Guest Expert: Laurel Marshfield
Is professional editing worth it?
The answer depends on just one thing: Where, in your development as an author, you currently are.
If this is the first book you’ve ever written and you’re mostly self-taught, professional editing is most likely not the only step you need to take between banging out your very first manuscript and landing a publisher.
In fact, for a first-time author with no formal training, I wouldn’t recommend professional copyediting at all.
Here’s What Authors Really Need
Copyediting (not the same as developmental editing or book-doctoring) is one of the last steps before submission. And if the basic elements of fiction (or nonfiction) are only half-realized, or missing altogether, no amount of editing for errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax; no amount of querying the absence of meaningful transitions, the presence of redundancies, or violations of consistency will matter.
An unrealized book manuscript with perfect spelling, grammar, and syntax is still a manuscript that’s not yet ready for publication.
What is needed — when that is the case — is practice: writing one book after another to learn the nuts and bolts of craft, as well as how to coax the magic of art onto the page.
Most successful authors produce between two and ten practice books before their “first” book is awarded a pub date. To snag the brass ring of publication, an author must first be a longtime student of the form.
But many otherwise sensible people don’t see the need. “I’m a fan of So-and-So,” they say. “I see how his fiction formula works. And I can do that, too – only a thousand times better.”
Every Author’s Path to Publication
The thing is, books are far easier to read than they are to write. Even the most clichéd genre fiction requires a surprising amount of skill – skill that its author worked to acquire. Realizing this fact — that practice will get you where you want to go — is the ultimate encouragement. It means there’s a path to this place (though each path is individual, with its length, twists, and turns unique).
Is It Time for a Manuscript Evaluation?
Let’s say you’ve done a bunch of practice books, cultivated your skills for a number of years, and you’re solidly at the next stage of your development as an author — what then?
You might be ready to hand your manuscript over to a developmental editor for a written manuscript evaluation. An eval will tell you where you’ve succeeded and what you’re especially good at — as well as where you need to think things through a bit more and do some additional work.
With your evaluation in hand, you can nurture the less well-developed parts of your manuscript, learn new skills, restructure if needed, and rewrite — perhaps several times more.
After that, you may be ready for a developmental edit, if other issues remain; or, you may be ready for the final polish of copyediting. It all depends.