Why Use a Professional Editor or Designer?

Why should you hire a professional editor?

All writers, even those who have been published for years, benefit from editing. Even if you have extensively edited your own work, you still need an objective outsider’s viewpoint–someone who is not judgmental and will work hard to strengthen your manuscript.

How do professional writers consider editing? Best-selling author Stephen King has his drafts critiqued and edited by multiple people before he sends anything to his publisher. Having your work checked by a third party allows for a fresh, unbiased and non-partisan opinion, helping you fix problems and errors you may have otherwise missed.

Familiarity with your own work makes it easy to skip errors. We all see what we think is there, not what’s actually there. That’s why it’s important to let a fresh set of eyes review your work and catch those overlooked mistakes. We will examine your writing with a fine-toothed comb, examining its content to ensure that it is cohesive, consistent and clear.

A good editor “tightens” your writing while preserving your style. Some of the best writers in the world have a real problem with cutting their own material. As a result, their manuscripts are cluttered with superfluous passages that obstruct or obscure the message. Of course, to delete these passages is unthinkable to them. A skillful editor/ book doctor will dispassionately excise the fluff and redundancy, and, although it may sting for a while, the manuscript will be better and healthier because of it.

Even if you choose to complete your book by yourself, you need to have at least one professional look at your work before publication. At the very least, have someone besides yourself do basic copy editing. And, if you can, have your manuscript professionally evaluated too.

The bottom line is this: Even if your book is well written and well designed, if it is poorly edited or not edited at all, it will reflect poorly on you. A well-edited book will reflect well on you and will boost your credibility as an author.

In her book, How to Publish and Promote Online, written with Angela J. Adair-Hoy, M.J. Rose wrote the following:

“Whether you plan to self-publish your book or work with an e-publishing house, you need to invest in your work. Almost none of the online publishing companies edit books to the extent that every book needs to be edited.

“Once you’re happy with your book, you should hire a freelance book doctor or editor to read the manuscript, make corrections, and give you a professional opinion. This step is critical. There will be literally hundreds of thousands of books published . . . every year, and your book is competing with every single one of them. . . .

“No matter how terrific a writer you are, it’s almost impossible to edit your own work and see what’s missing. That’s why . . . you need to hire a professional editor . . . We can’t emphasize enough the need to have your book edited . . . and look just as professional as any other book out there. You are competing with Stephen King and Nora Roberts whether you like it or not.

“You don’t want to lose your credibility with a reader when he or she opens your book and finds typos and grammatical errors in the first paragraph. Believe me, you won’t get a second chance with that reader . . . When your book is as perfect as it can be, it’s time to get it out there in the hands of buyers!”

—M. J. Rose, “In the Beginning . . . ,” in M. J. Rose and Angela Adair-Hoy, How to Publish and Promote Online (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), 5-7.

While most editors focus on correcting the mistakes in manuscripts, we prefer a two-pronged approach: Correct the errors and explain WHY these errors occurred. When working with any writer, our goal is to improve his or her writing by highlighting areas for improvement and explaining exactly how to make the writing better. We strive to help create better writers, not just better manuscripts.

Let us help you tighten your manuscript, and you will already be a step ahead of 99 percent of writers looking to break into the publishing business. Getting your work critiqued before you submit it to any publisher or agent will provide you with valuable feedback that you may have missed. With our help, your writing will speak for itself and stand out from the rest of the slush pile sitting on the desk of the agent, acquisitions editor, or university professor.

One of the most common questions self-publishing authors ask is whether or not they can submit a book designed in Microsoft Word® to their printer. After all, most computer users own Word and it makes sense that you can save some money by designing the book yourself. While it is true that you can create decent, clean layouts in Microsoft Word®, the software was not specifically designed for creating extensive page layouts. (Even Microsoft uses Publisher® for their high-end work.) You will have problems with final output. For example, word processor files may reflow text when moved from one computer to another. Your document may end up having radically different formatting or pagination, even if both computers have the same version of Microsoft Word®.

We use Adobe PageMaker® and Adobe InDesign®, the best layout programs on the market, to create interior book layouts. We generate the final output as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file, using Adobe Acrobat®, the best publication program on the market. PDFs are used to encode the exact look of a document, so that it will appear the same on every machine that opens the file. It is the format most printers prefer. Most leading printers now require that the PDF files be converted to postscript before they can become PDF files.

We have found that some virus writers, trojan producers, spyware, and other malware designers have begun to PDF files with their evil software. To combat this, we have developed alternate transmission methods between our computer network, our clients and our vendors. This ensures a corrupt-free, private and secure transmission of all of your PDF files.

Even if your manuscript is a combination of Microsoft Word®, Microsoft Excel® and Microsoft Power Point®, we can transfer your work into our professional layout programs to give your book a professional look, worthy of all the time and effort you have invested in your manuscript. We dedicate ourselves to turning your manuscript into a quality book–a book that best represents your hard work and commitment.

We can help you avoid reviews like these:

About John Milton: “His fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff and his memory will always stink” (William Winstanley, diary, 1687).

About Emily Dickinson: “An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar . . . Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood” (Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly, 1892).

About F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, 1925: “What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only . . .” (New York Herald Tribune).

(Quotations are from Bill Henderson, ed., Rotten Reviews: A Literary Companion (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 63, 33, 42.