First Impressions - Why editing matters
Hello Dear Readers!
Today I want to talk about the editing. I’ve written about editing woes before and my experience with a variety of editors, but today I want to discuss why editing is so important.
As an independent author, it can be really difficult to be taken seriously in the writing or reading community. Not always, there are a lot of people who are incredibly supportive of independent authors. There is sometimes the idea that you couldn’t hack it as a professional writer, or that your work was too terrible to be picked up by an agent or trad publisher, or that you’re just lazy, or a bunch of other stigma, which are generally untrue.
Writers, just like people, come in a whole variety of shapes, sizes, skills, abilities, and have different levels of competence, risk tolerance, patience, and so on. Some people query for years before getting picked up by an agent. And even then, just getting a literary agent to represent you does not guarantee they will be able to sell your manuscript to a publisher.
Take these numbers with a grain of salt, since they were provided by Google, but estimates cite that the chances of securing a literary agent range somewhere between 1 in 3000 to 1 in 6000. Further estimates go on to say that roughly only 1 to 2% of manuscripts submitted to publishers ever get accepted.
What can you take away from this?
If you are an author who wants to go the trad publishing route: the better quality your manuscript is, the more seriously an agent or a publisher is going to take it and the further ahead of the competition this can put you. If you are able to, work with a developmental editor to really tighten your story, hone your voice, and get your book in the best possible shape you can before submitting it.
If you are an author who doesn’t want to deal with querying, and you want to go the self-published route, editing is STILL vital to the success of your work. Remember all those stigma I listed just a few paragraphs ago? While you have completely control over your work, that means everything comes back to you and first impressions matter.
I’ve been back and forth with Phil and Dustin a few times about proof editing. I understand that when you are first getting started, it can be tempting to think that readers will be forgiving and understanding, and that typos and grammar don’t matter much. You might be short on funds and not feel like you can afford an editor. Or you might feel like it doesn’t matter and you’ll simply go back and fix things up after the fact, once you have more books out.
I am here to tell you that readers DNF books for all kinds of reasons. Don’t let grammar and typos be one of them. Don’t put it off. Excellent proof editing are like customer service. Most people don’t notice it unless it’s done poorly.
A while back Phil had a reader reach out to him to let him know that while his book was very good, it had a number of grammatical errors and that he almost did not finish it as a result. In this case Phil’s excellent storytelling saved him, but it was a really stark reminder that readers can and do pay attention to those things. So Phil had to go back and carefully edit and re-release his book.
At Dragonsteel Nexus 2025 last year, Dustin had a similar experience. I wrote about Bryan who came by our table and gave us all the First Line Test. He picked up some of our books, read Dustin’s that night, and came back to talk to Dustin about it the next day. He had some great feedback, but also pointed out that there were some inconsistencies. For example a character’s name was spelled two different ways throughout the book among a few other things.
Dustin has since worked with a proof editor to get these inconsistencies corrected. But now I have to go through and reformat and re-upload his book. It’s double work on my part, and if Dustin had been paying someone to his layout and book management work for him, they would have charged him again. Ingram spark charges you to make changes to your manuscript or cover last time I checked.
In my humble opinion, choosing not to work with an editor on the front end under the pretense of saving money just costs you more time and money later on down the road and can leave readers with a negative impression of your work. They can, and do, notice these things.
Put your best foot forward, right from the start and make a great first impression with your readers. Don’t let something as fixable as typos and grammar keep your books from giving readers the best possible experience, and potentially turning them off from your work for good.
Despite all your best efforts, there will likely always be some little typo or something that gets through. This happens even to trad published authors with a team of editors and designers working on their book. (I’m looking at you Heroes of Oympus.)
Personally I find a lot of comfort in this. This book went through an entire team of people and went on to get published with thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands copies printed and no one caught this typo. It happens. That is the nature of typos. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our best in order to give our readers the best possible version of our story and make the best first impression that we can. In my experience, it’s not worth postponing or putting it off.
Till next time dear reader, let me know what editing pet peeves you have or what areas you like to make a strong first impression in. <3 Tiff
