Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Ah but with e-books the production costs are minimal, basically editing is all that's required. And I'm of the opinion that authors need to learn to edit their own work. It's not that hard.
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Kovid, it is very difficult to successfully edit your own work -- not impossible, but exceedingly difficult. We tend to "see" what we expect to see and an author who has gone through several drafts working his/her way toward a final draft knows too much of his/her own writing.
Granted I work primarily in nonfiction, but in my 25 years of doing so, there have been hundreds of incidents where, for example, authors have written a medicine doasge as grams when they meant milligrams and never caught it because they knew better.
I can't say how easy it is for an author to format an ebook, that's your expertise, but I do not think it should be so readily assumed that anyone can be an editor -- they can't. Editing is much more (or if properly done should be much more) than simply checking that every sentence has ending punctuation and every word is spelled correctly. For an idea (very broadly) of what professional editors, do see
Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor. For an idea of some of the materials a professional editor makes use of and needs to be familiar with, see
Professional Editors: Publishers and Authors Need Them (Part 1) and
Professional Editors: Publishers and Authors Need Them (Part 2).