The Editor Adventure

The Editor Adventure

I’ve just begun my astonishing adventure into the world of editors. I will go more in depth on this subject because I had no idea how deep the editing pool is. When I first started out on this journey with BiaAtlas, I was new and shiny and had the idea that an editor is unnecessary. I can do it myself and save myself the money.  Yes and no. Back then it was just me and my handy dandy word processing program and a good dose of naiveté. While I can comb through line by line carefully I will miss mistakes, even big ones because I wrote them to start with. Word processing programs such as Word perfect, windows word or any that generally come with an office suite or your computer when purchased are not good enough. They don’t recognize incorrect correctly spelled words such as though instead of thought. Currently, I’m using a secondary editing service one that I tried for free and found it to be the easiest and most useful of the bunch. I am now paying for the editing service from Grammarly, and I’m thrilled to bits. 

Now while my writing and editing has improved vastly with the help of Grammarly, it is still not perfect. Even with the help of a professional, there is no guarantee it will be perfect. Heck, I find typos in published books from well-established authors and reputable publishers. My point is editing is a murky, complicated business and the more outside eyes on the project, the better. 

Things I’m currently looking into and will share more detail once I’ve sorted it all out. 

• There are different types of editing services and editors out there

• Various editor-preditors are lurking to scam (Sad but true)

• There are many editing packages and options available

• When it comes to editing everyone with a word processor thinks they can charge you for their service. Thus there are the good the bad and the ‘are you kidding me’ editors vying for business. Seriously found one that had so many mistakes on their blog and could barely string a sentence together declaring they were a freelance editor and ghostwriters. 

• It is hard to part with money and separate the ego(I can do this on my own) from the understanding that if I’m serious,s I need to invest to succeed.

It’s kind of like a treasure hunt to find an editor worth investing with. Trust, experience, testimonies and overall first impressions show an editor’s worth. Not to mention contracts. 

I spent countless hours(I seriously lost count) Querying and combing through literary agents only to discover that my query letter was the problem. One would think a writer can write a query letter easy peasy, they wrote the book, right? Not so easy, and seriously not so peasy. I also now know that my query process was blunt and needs some finesse. So now I am diving into the world of editors and while I learn to swim, I’ll share my findings so that perhaps someone else out there who might be as stubborn as I was might learn a thing or two. It’s also a lot of research so wish me luck. 

FYI before I edited this post, there were(From mostly typo’s) 25 critical issues and 14 advanced issues that needed to be fixed. I’ll be back with more info as I go.

My advice about editors.

For now, it’s pretty slim, do some research, and as with all things in life, you get what you pay for. So when everyone is falling in around $200 for one page and someone offers $25, chances are they are running it through a program or have no idea what they’re doing. 

-Sheryl

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