Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
So where do some of us on shoestring budgets get the money to hire a pro editor? Not all of us can shell out hundreds of dollars on a whim.
|
I agree that teh603 was a little negative calling editing a whim, but she has a point (I'm assuming it's a she based on the avatar). The editor, whether it's a copy editor or a developmental editor or both, is a necessary part of the mainstream publishing process, and, as others have pointed out, almost certainly takes the part of the publisher over the author.
But with more and more books, both pbooks and ebooks being published each year, if you don't have the mainstream publishing companies behind you, you're going to be very lucky indeed if you make any money. My first book has made me less than $50. To be sure it could almost certainly have been marginally improved by a copy editor, but I don't think it was a bad book. Certainly it was a lot better book than many indy books I've bought. But it was competing with, I think the figure two years ago was 300000 new books a year, which means that you have to be VERY lucky to get any sales.
I'm not expecting much more from my second book, which is light years better than the first in many ways. So I, like many others, are definitely not doing it for the money. Oh, maybe one dreams of a kind of Cinderella story from time to time, but one wakes up again the next morning. And the several hundred dollars even a copy editor would charge are just not in an indy writer's real world, unless (s)he's independently wealthy.
So I think we're going to see a two tier market for books. The mainstream market, professionally edited, where more and more, the author will lose control over his creation, just as film scriptwriters have done. And the indy market, probably not even copy-edited, except maybe by friends. And anyone who buys an indy book knows this, and accepts the typos, the clumsily constructed sentences, and forgives the author as long as the story is good.
So editors, concentrate on the mainstream market. You're not going to make any more money from us indy writers than we make ourselves.