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In today’s world, penning an e-book or self-publishing one is a task that may be accomplished with relative ease. It is also a smart method to promote your brand, help other people, grow your freelance career, and make more money from your writing.
However, after you have completed the writing of your book, there is at least one more phase in the process: editing. And it’s the kind of thing that many authors dread doing. What are your options? Do you go it alone and edit the book yourself, seek the services of a freelance book editor, or use a book editing service?
Finding an editor who is a good fit for your book doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, and it shouldn’t give you headaches.
Table of Contents
What is a Book Editor?
Ideally, a book editor would be a person or a company whose line of work involves improving the quality of one or more written works, whether published or unpublished. Book editors need to be objective in their job, harsh, and have some insights into the artistry of a story. Most book editors have at least some higher education level, majoring in either English or Journalism.
What Can an Editor Bring to Your Book?
In the world of self-publishing, the golden rule is to employ the services of a qualified book editor. Nothing can compare to the experience that an expert can offer to your work, particularly in this day and age when readers have become so judgmental.
Regardless of the function that an expert editor plays, this is what your work stands to gain from their involvement.
Add a Professional Touch
Editors will analyze the word choice in your piece. They will read over your novel to check for cliches and verify that the context and vocabulary are consistent. They will examine how many different expressions you use and what kind of reaction they produce in the reader.
Ensure Readability
When we write, we often produce sentences that are awkward, overly long, and filled with unnecessary information. Editors will assist in cutting these unnecessary words to clean up the syntax and context so the reader can understand it.
Eliminate Plot Holes
In this stage of the editing process, editors look for a theme and character consistency, which involves understanding where the author is coming from and directing them to where they need to go.
Set a Consistent Tone
When moving from one scene to the next in your novel, the mood and tone should remain stable and effective. A competent editor can help you assess whether or not the atmosphere is appropriate for the scene, where the scene should be placed within the book, and whether or not you should try something different at that particular time to pull readers along.
How to Find the Best Editor for Your Book?
1. So you’ve already done the hard work, poured your heart and mind into your manuscript, and are aware of how an edit can improve your published work. You may also have edited it yourself, most likely making all of the required modifications that friends and family suggested. You are thinking at this point that it is time to hire the services of an experienced editor to tie up any loose ends that may remain in your narrative.
Working with editing companies appears to be a practical choice for most writers interested in outsourcing book editing. When it comes to self-publishing, this is the accepted norm.
However, you might also delegate the work to freelancers. These independent professional editors have unimaginable possibilities available to them and are not constrained by the knowledge of in-house editors. If you have never collaborated with an editor before, it is essential to clearly understand who performs what and when to seek their assistance.
The following is a list of three different ways you can find the perfect editor for your book:
Understand the Kind of Editing You Need
The fee you will be expected to pay for editing services is highly variable and is based on various considerations.
All your book needs may be quick proofreading by an editor to spot any typos or stray errors. You could also consider working with an editor who can assist you in revising your book.
Acquainting yourself with the many editing options accessible can help you select the appropriate editor. A few different kinds of editing include:
- Developmental edit: includes broad-brush, in-depth, and macro correction.
- Copyediting: flow and structure editing, grammatical editing, and micro editing
- Proofreading: format, layout, and consistency checks
Look for Editors in Your Niche
No matter how long you’ve been writing or how recently you started, its common knowledge that the most successful authors focus their work on a certain subfield or specialty. Why? By specializing your efforts, you can become an expert in a certain field, and improve the quality of the content you produce, the questions you ask, and the sources and research you conduct.
Make sure that the person you will entrust the task of making adjustments to your book, particularly for developmental editing, has prior experience working in your particular field.
Test Your Potential Editors Before Hiring
Some authors search for an editor by emailing potential candidates a page from their work and asking for a sample edit from each of them. It is a reliable method for determining whether an editor can spot errors, make better word choices, and preserve your voice. However, this is not the only technique to evaluate an editor’s expertise.
What would happen if you sent someone a quiz on editing for which you already knew the answers? One way to determine which editor has the most command of grammatical conventions is to compare the results obtained from multiple editors. This will ensure the effectiveness of an editor, particularly concerning copy editing.
Take Away
Your work will either make or break your reputation as an author. You may not get the recognition you deserve if your work contains style issues, grammatical flaws, and communication problems. Hiring a professional editor would ensure your book is in its best form.
You may meet with fiction editors after you have written a few chapters or even as you outline your book and brainstorm. By doing so, you will (hopefully) be able to avoid significant revisions and put yourself on track for a straightforward process of producing a book. When you finish the process, it is generally a good time to start putting together your team and getting yourself and your manuscript ready for the editorial review.
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