Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
As for cover and editing. If you can't afford a professional you must find suitable alternatives (suitably picky friends or lots and lots of carefully spent time). The reaction described by meeera is entirely predictable and expected. With the huge proliferation of work out there, most readers will have little patience with anything that smacks of lazy production. (The quite reasonable logic here is: if you can't be bothered presenting your story well, then why should the reader be bothered?) There is no time to visit everything coming out (almost 53,000 new literature and fiction releases on Amazon in the last 30 days!), so readers will automatically discard on the most superficial of criteria just to cut that selection back to something more manageable.
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Just popping back in to say that I don't think that deciding not to read a book based on it being riddled with grammatical errors is a superficial criterion. Every time I strike one of those errors, I'm thrown out of the story. When there is >= 1 error per paragraph I have absolutely no chance of ever making a start on settling in to the story. None. One per page would still be way too many. The writing IS the story. It's not a tacked-on ignorable extra.