Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Pretty much every author needs a professional editor to make their work readable, and most self-publishing authors can't afford to - or choose not to - pay for an editor themselves. That's the most valuable service that a traditional publisher provides to an author: editing. It has nothing to do with the writing abilities of the author; editing is a different skill to writing, and very few good writers are also good editors.
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Editors are like invisible co-authors. Some are good, some are bad, and a lot of them are probably frustrated writers themselves. In music terms they would be like the knob twiddler on a mixing desk. They can improve a book, but they can also destroy it if they don't fully understand what the writer is trying to achieve.