Amazon's In Luck: Some Major Publishers Not Sold On Kindle "Agency" Model

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

My two cents:

I'm in the process of finishing up my first novel. I plan to do three rigorous edits on the book -- once, reading through on the computer screen and editing as I go. Twice, reading through on a paper print out with a highlighter and fixing after I finish the reading. Third time, reading out loud from a paper copy with a highlighter handy.

Then I'll be sending out to a few hand-selected beta readers, gods bless their souls. And I'll fix anything THEY find.

Tedious? Yes. Time-consuming? Yes. Cheaper than some of the professional editing quotes out there that are more often than not lacking in any references or guarantees? Yep. Worth it? I think so.

Will every single error be caught? Probably not. But I think 99.99% of them will be. I hope, anyway. We'll see.

What you're proposing is of course excellent practice, but it doesn't cover what professional editors actually DO - that is, tighten up the story and generally make it more "readable". That's something it's virtually impossible for an author to do herself.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Have you considered adding text-to-speech to the list? The brain will compensate for some errors that we see written, but things might stand out more if a software program does the reading.

That's an interesting idea. Back in the day, they sucked pretty hard, but I reckon they're probably more sophisticated now. I'll look into that -- thanks!

Originally Posted by HarryT

What you're proposing is of course excellent practice, but it doesn't cover what professional editors actually DO - that is, tighten up the story and generally make it more "readable". That's something it's virtually impossible for an author to do herself.

Some of them do, yes. (Not all of them do -- there's an excellent thread around here about the different kinds of editors and what they do.)

But I'd rather rely on my writing group to help with that than pay money to an internet stranger with vague references, which is -- at the moment -- the only "professional editing" options that would be available to me.

Furthermore, the price quotes I've been seeing are in the high hundreds and even thousands. I'm unfortunately not in a place to invest that level of scratch at the moment, so I'll have to rely on my years of experience with books as a hobbyist reviewer and on the aforementioned writing group and beta readers. Not a perfect solution, I know, but it is what it is.

[Kali Yuga]

H'm, 2 pages of comments on topics not even covered in a thread that's been dormant for like 1.5 years.

Slow news day, eh?