Editing services

Clare, put it this way: suppose your mss makes it to the very first step of the long, long ladder to the publisher. The lowly reader charged with sifting through all the mss in a pile on their desk picks up yours along with another of equal worth plotwise.Yours has been edited - no typos, no repetitions, no 'man goes to window then gets out of bed' bloopers, no malapropisms, and no grammatical mistakes. The other has them all. Which is the reader going to choose to put forward? Which one are they going to persevere with?

Agents and publishers just don't have the time to plough through badly-produced mss. And why should they, when there are so many better-prepared authors clamouring for attention? You owe it to yourself to offer them the very best work you can produce.

When your book is traditionally published, the publisher may or may not employ an editor. If they do, there will be a cost incurred, which will inevitably be met by you, even though you aren't charged upfront. It will all be catered for in their cut of the proceeds from sales.

If you are self-publishing, you are responsible for everything that the buyer will eventually hold in his hands. When I read a (self-published or otherwise) book on Kindle that hasn't had a whiff of an editing pen, I give up. It's not only cheating the buyer to expect them to pay for this unfinished work: it sells the author short. I can't be bothered if they can't. Agents and publishers are like me but magnified a hundred times: they won't put up with badly written offerings any more than I will, but I've already paid to read (or reject) the product; they will stop anyone from doing so, at least under their house name.

Editing is expensive because it is hard and intense work. It's up to you to decide whether you have the knowledge of grammar, spelling and punctuation to make a good job of it yourself, and whether you can be detached enough to know whether the plot works, or whether the secondary characters earn their keep.

If you can't afford an editor, there are things that you can do yourself that will help, but a lot depends upon your own level of expertise.

You need to start by putting your novel into a different format - different font, colour, on paper, whatever - than the one in which you have worked. You have to shock the brain into seeing what is, not what it thinks is there. If you have a Kindle or other device, send your mss to it, and increase the font size so that there isn't so much text visible per page. You are far more likely to notice mistakes that way - and it's also why anything destined for Kindle etc should be edited very carefully: it's the magnifying glass effect.

If you don't know the rules of punctuation, you're not going to get them right. My blog explains a fair few of them, so take a look there. https://wordsunderoneroof.wordpress.com

Do all your story threads reach a conclusion, or is there a reason why they don't? Does the whole thing flow? Does the timescale of events work?

Are you consistent? Have you changed a character's name halfway through? Have you done a search and replace for the wrong ones?

It means seeing the words, not the story, and then, when you've done that, seeing the story, not the words. An editor reads your work three times. You must do the same. It's tedious, and it's time-consuming, but there's no quick way round it.

Hope this helps.

Lorraine