Why You Need a Professional Editor for Your Self-Published Book

Oct 12, 2021 | Book Publishing

Your book needs a professional editor. A professional editor is someone whose business is editing. A professional is not your cousin who majored in English. It’s not your friend who is “good with words.” A professional editor is someone whose business is editing.

Of course, that means that a professional editor will charge you money for editing your manuscript. Too many self-published authors think that they can save money by not hiring a professional editor. They will save money, but they will also miss the value a professional editor brings to their book.

A good editor will save you from embarrassment and ridicule.

It’s better to find problems ahead of time instead of after your book is published. An editor will help you there. He or she will find things in your manuscript that would embarrass you if readers found them after you published.

Here’s what can happen if you don’t invest in a professional editor. Brenda Covert (who is an editor and my virtual assistant) describes a book she received as a gift.

“The cover was well done, and the story seemed like it might be interesting… I was so disappointed! What looked like a professionally done book was self-published and riddled with punctuation and word mistakes—not misspellings, but wrong words spelled correctly. For instance, would you be familiar with the expression “mother’s raft”? Me neither. From the context, I deduced that the author meant “mother’s wrath.” There were many such errors in the first two chapters, which is as far as I got.”

A good editor will save you from yourself.

Don’t kid yourself. There are errors all through your manuscript. It’s not because you’re a bad person, or even a bad writer. It’s because humans don’t do “perfect.”

A good editor will also find and point out any verbal tics. Then you can decide whether to leave them in your manuscript or not.

A good editor will make your book better.

Good editors often make suggestions that will make the entire book better. On one book project, the editor suggested dividing the chapters into three sections. That immediately made the book more usable. Over the years, I’ve seen editors suggest additions and deletions that improved the book they were working on.

A good editor will make sure your book conforms to professional standards.

Every craft has its norms and standards. For books, those standards are described in style manuals. The AP Stylebook and the Chicago Style Manual were the most common for business books I worked on. A good editor will use a style manual to decide how to handle all kinds of writing questions.

You and your editor should be on the same team.

There are three basic ways you can work with an editor. You can treat the editor as an adversary. You can treat the editor as an all-knowing guru. Or you can treat the editor as a teammate.

When you treat the editor as an adversary, you set up a competition where the only loser is the book. When you treat the editor as an all-knowing guru, you abdicate responsibility for the final product.

Working as a team is the best way. That way you gain from the expertise and experience of the editor while assuring that the manuscript says exactly what you want.

Takeaways

A good editor will save you from embarrassment and ridicule.

A good editor will save you from yourself.

A good editor will make your book better.

A good editor will make sure your book conforms to professional standards.

You and your editor should be on the same team.