Paid Book Editors: Worth It?

     It used to be that getting a book published was a lengthy process that had to be handled by the information transfer mechanisms in place then, namely the mail and the telephone. Developing authors used to submit their own best work to one of the big book publishers, usually through an agent, and then hope for the best. Authors who wanted to publish but couldn't get a bite from conventional publishers sometimes opted for what were called vanity presses that would print copies of their manuscript for a price, and the authors then tried to sell the books themselves.
     The internet changed all of that thirty years ago. Nowadays, there are so many little micropresses and web magazines on the net that they seem to be everywhere. They usually have little or no editorial staff beyond the site operators. This level of book publisher typically doesn't pay an advance to authors, relying instead on sharing a piece of net profits, and only a few of the independent webzines pay contributors.
      But both of these relatively new, web-based, and seemingly ubiquitous publishing enterprises do offer an alternate, less daunting potential path to publication for the internet-spawned legions of aspiring writers who, for one reason or other, have not found a home in traditional publishing. On top of this, authors with a desire to publish their work themselves can now do so for little or no money using one of the several free self-publishing platforms offered by such formidable entities as Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Unhappy with the expectations of agents and major publishers looking for salable products in a shrinking consumer marketplace, an awful lot of aspiring writers with their latest best draft under their arms are turning toward these choices. The trouble is that the little publisher often has no editing staff of its own and expects the writer’s submitted ms to be largely printer ready. This has incited authors who are insecure about how good their stories are to hire freelance editors with their own money to try to make them better before they even send them to publishers. This situation has in turn spawned a huge cottage industry that mostly didn't exist before the internet outside the back classified ads of a couple of writing magazines: the freelance book editor, also known as a content editor, substantive editor, or book doctor.
     These independent operators purport to do the same thing their counterparts at the traditional publishing houses do, which is to improve the so-called “big picture” of a novel, the creative core of plot, imagery, characterizations, and the other ethereal, intangible parts that make a story. Most of them also claim to know the current markets. The ability to see all of these things is, obviously, subjective for any developmental editor, and in the case of the independent editors (who do not have the in-house editors' knowledge of what is being looked for or the implicit faith of the publishers who employ them), inference of the presence of such ability requires a sort of leap of faith on the part of the client writer.
      For-hire book doctors are essentially professional readers who, ostensibly, see the weak parts of your story and give you advice about how to fix them. Now, if an author were to submit directly to any particular publisher, that publisher's editor could easily see a set of problems different from those the freelance editor might find. The same disparity would almost certainly present itself within any group of developmental editors. If an author found three or four book doctors offering free sample edits, the same manuscript excerpt could be sent to all of them with a measure of confidence that three or four substantially different reports would come back.
     Freelance DEs are also the most expensive—most expensive by far—kind of fiction manuscript editors. Freelance book doctors can easily cost $2,000-$4,000.00, and different editors provide varying services for the money. You might get a story report and/or an annotated copy of your edited ms with suggestions you might want to take action on. Periodically, you might have phone calls, emails, or private Zoom meetings to field concerns and gauge progress. You might get a couple of these things; you might get all of them. There's no set protocol.

Most traditional publishers have, have always had, their own editors to do any necessary work on your manuscript. They begin doing that only after it's accepted for publication, and all such work is figured into the operating costs of what they do. They do not charge you for it. That’s worth saying again. Your manuscript doesn't get edited before it's accepted, and that editing doesn’t cost you anything.
     You pay a freelancer out of your own pocket to edit your book before it is ever submitted to a publisher in the hope that what the editor has found will make the small publisher like your book better. Maybe it will. But if it doesn't, if the publisher sees something different, what's to do? Hire another editor to fix those things?

Believe in yourself.

 Next time: Copyeditors  who all provide similar results, who will always make your manuscript better unless it's perfect, but who can't help much with your story.