{"id":1733,"date":"2018-12-22T16:19:21","date_gmt":"2018-12-22T21:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=1733"},"modified":"2021-09-04T10:14:35","modified_gmt":"2021-09-04T14:14:35","slug":"do-you-need-a-professional-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/do-you-need-a-professional-editor\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Need A Professional Editor?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Okay, if your typos are as bad as they are in this pic, then you probably need an editor.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Say you\u2019ve finished writing a book\u2014congrats! You\u2019ve made a few editing passes through it, roped a few of your friends and relatives into reading it, gotten their feedback, and tweaked it into what you think is an acceptable form to show to the world at large. Maybe you\u2019ve even queried a handful of literary agents and received either \u201cThanks but no thanks\u201d rejections or (more likely) radio silence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

[A note about agent queries: rejections via silence are becoming the new normal\u2026which I don\u2019t totally understand, since copying and pasting a two-sentence form rejection e-mail and hitting the send button should take no more than 30 seconds, but whatever. Having said that, agents know you\u2019re querying a bunch of other agents at the same time\u2014that\u2019s standard\u2014so if they\u2019re interested in your work they\u2019ll jump on it quickly. Therefore, if you don\u2019t hear back from an agent query within about a week, the answer is almost certainly no. Feel free to cross them off your list. They may send you the aforementioned two-sentence form rejection letter three months later, for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact I was going to write a whole post about how to query agents, but since I\u2019ve gotten a positive response exactly one time ever out of 100+ submissions, I figured I wasn\u2019t the best person to advise other people about the topic. I\u2019m almost at the point where I advise not querying agents at all, given the chances of success are vanishingly small compared to the work you\u2019ll put into the endeavor, and instead to self-publish everything and wait for agents to come to you if they’re so inclined. I\u2019m almost<\/em> there, but not quite yet. I\u2019ll let you know when that happens.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, so you\u2019re at a point where you intend to self-publish. A big question a lot of authors ask themselves is: do I need a professional editor to go through my manuscript?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TLDR answer: Probably not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long answer:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most other writers\u2014and the writing-adjacent community, aka people trying to sell you something\u2014will tell you pro-editors are critical<\/em>. And it\u2019s undeniably true a pro-editor will make your book better. But here\u2019s the thing: pro-editors are expensive. Your average freelance pro-editor will run you $1,000 – $3,000, depending on the size of your manuscript. A service you pay for should be judged by the return-on-investment (ROI) you get for your money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For self-publishing, that ROI should be measured in book sales<\/strong>. For instance\u2014if you spend $2,000 on a pro-editor, your book sales should increase<\/em> by at least <\/em>$2,000 of profit<\/em><\/strong>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to maximize your ROI, you want to hit a threshold\nof quality your readers expect without going over\u2014like the final showcase on The Price Is Right! (Win that new\nwasher-and-dryer, Kia Soul, and trip to Scotland, dammit!)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, bringing it back to the question at hand: do you need a\npro-editor? The answer depends on two things: 1) What\u2019s the threshold of\nquality your readers expect from your genre? and 2) How good of a writer are\nyou in general?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerning question 1: the cold-hard truth is most readers\nin most genres aren\u2019t super-sensitive to quality. As long as your prose is\ngrammatically correct, flows okay, and doesn\u2019t have more than a small handful\nof typos, you\u2019re probably fine. Rather than hiring an expensive copy editor,\nunless your prose is total trash you can get by with auto-editors like\nGrammarly and WordRake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerning question 2: if you\u2019re not<\/em> a decent and\/or experienced writer, and your beta readers are\npointing out major problems with your manuscript, then rather than hiring an\nexpensive editor to make your ugly baby beautiful you should pause your\npublication plans and study the craft. However, if you are<\/em> an experienced writer with a good grasp on wordsmithing and\nstorytelling techniques, and you\u2019ve gotten useful feedback you\u2019ve incorporated\ninto your manuscript, then dropping a bunch of cash on a pro-editor to make\nsome fine-tuning tweaks is probably not worth the money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the financial reality<\/strong>: let\u2019s say you sell your e-book on Kindle Unlimited (KU) for $2.99 (an average price), netting 70% royalties (standard for e-books in this price range). Assuming you spent ~$2,000 on a pro-editor, in order to simply break even (or in math-speak to have an ROI of 1.0 – above 1.0 and you’ve made money; below and you’ve lost money) you\u2019d need to sell 2,000\/(2.99 x 0.7) = 956 extra copies<\/em> than you would have otherwise without the editor\u2019s help. Since most newbie authors are lucky to get anyone other than their mom and close friends to buy their book, that\u2019s unlikely to happen. To make things worse, if you want to price your book competitively at 99cents, with royalty rates of 35% (per KU), you\u2019ll need to sell 2000\/(0.99 x 0.35) = 5,772 (!) extra copies<\/em> to break even. If you don\u2019t have a large established fanbase already, this is simply not going to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer, then, to whether you need a professional editor\nfor your manuscript is probably no. I might suggest a pro-editor once, if\nyou\u2019ve never had one, simply to recognize the kinds of things they look for and\nto understand your craft better in general. But after that, don\u2019t waste your\nmoney. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The overall moral of the story is this: just because something is better<\/em> doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s worth more.<\/em><\/strong> And what something is worth<\/em> depends on the market for that product, not its objective quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[One more note about quality\u2014there are of course a few things whose worth is directly proportional to their quality; musical instruments and computers, for instance. This is definitely not true of books, however. A novel by Tolstoy and one by Dan Brown cost the same, with the medium on which it\u2019s delivered being the biggest price point factor (yes I’m throwing Dan Brown some shade – I don’t regret it!). This is why you need to be very careful spending big money on improving the quality of something when quality does not significantly affect its price point. You gotta be coldly pragmatic in this business! …But don’t loose all hope – if Dan Brown can be a bestseller, then so can you!]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Say you\u2019ve finished writing a book\u2014congrats! You\u2019ve made a few editing passes through it, roped a few of your friends and relatives into reading it, gotten their feedback, and tweaked it into what you think is an acceptable form to show to the world at large. Maybe you\u2019ve even queried a handful of literary agents … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Do You Need A Professional Editor?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[496,527],"tags":[378,381,377,72,375,379,380,80,376,206],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-self-publishing","tag-dan-brown","tag-financial-reality","tag-grammarly","tag-literary-agents","tag-professional-editor","tag-queries","tag-return-on-investment","tag-self-publishing","tag-wordrake","tag-writing-advice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Vyi8-rX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2981,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions\/2981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}