How Professional Editors Can Help

          Professional editors became editors for a reason: they want to make better, grammatically-accurate content. They want to help writers reach their goals and love to take weak sentences and polish them into a shine. Professional editors know the market, what sells and what doesn’t, what their readers want to know about, and what style of content best suits their needs. If you’re self-publishing your novel, an investment you should not try to skimp on is editing.

When you become too familiar with your work, you can glaze over obvious errors, miss key plot mistakes, and end up publishing work that lacks readability. A professional editor can look at your work from an outsider’s perspective. They can see what you’re trying to achieve and help you reach it while also helping make it sell to readers. Their experience and knowledge is honestly, invaluable. They see cracks that you may not and their services are worth the high dollar they charge.

Why You Should Pay the Most You Can for the Best Editor

Low-balling or offering less money than you should for editors will show in your work. If you grab a freelance editor that will read your novel for $20, they won’t spend the necessary time to understand it and will give you bad advice. You may save money in the short-term, but your work will for sure suffer.

A great editor is worth the cost because of their reading and editing skills. You can read your work 100 times and still miss the spelling mistake on page 125. They understand where you need changes, what should be cut that doesn’t forward the story, and know the market. If you can only afford $200 for a good editor, make sure they have the best skills available. You want to have someone who will work with you to change your work into something great. You want an editor you can feel comfortable asking stupid questions to that you know will give you the right answers. Someone you can continue to use for any writing you have in the future. Editing really can change your story from a great promise to a throw away.

Online Proofreaders for Penny Pinchers

Money may be tight for you right now and hiring a good editor is out of reach. There are free proofreading tools, such as Grammarly, that find mistakes in your work while teaching you how to overcome your most common errors. Although it doesn’t cost a dime, Grammarly provides top tier services to writers. It can check for plagiarism, grammar, punctuation, offer stylistic changes, teach you how to avoid mistakes, and teach you new writing techniques. It also offers a community for writers to connect through their question and answer boards. I’ve used the boards a few times and the response was fast, friendly, and correct. Grammarly offers everything a writer needs without the expense.

Editors are Here to Help

Editors want to help you and can push you to be a better writer. Many famous writers, including Stephen King, have been using the same editor for years. They find a good fit and stick with them. Editors also offer excellent advice on where the market is going, style, and PR. They can help you find the right people to promote your book while making it your best possible material. Cheap editors may not always know what’s the best direction for your material and they don’t offer all the same quality services. You don’t have to break the bank to get a great editor but you also shouldn’t sacrifice the quality of your manuscript over a few dollars.

By Nikolas Baron

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About Nikolas:

Nikolas discovered his love for the written word in Elementary School, where he started spending his afternoons sprawled across the living room floor devouring one Marc Brown children’s novel after the other and writing short stories about daring pirate adventures. After acquiring some experience in various marketing, business development, and hiring roles at internet startups in a few different countries, he decided to re-unite his professional life with his childhood passions by joining Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. He has the pleasure of being tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and others about how they use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to improve their writing. His free time is spent biking, traveling, and reading.