Does Editing a Manuscript Help get it Published? Part 6 of 12

There are days… sometimes it’s easy to edit. I like to do my work in small chunks, say a chapter, or a few pages. It makes my life easier, and the task often seems less daunting. There are days, that everyone has when the task of editing is hard.

Don’t worry I’m not having one of those days. I’m still waiting to hear back from my editor on corrections. I sent them on the 29th of may for a final round of checks. I should receive it back sometime this week.

All a part of the job. It has its moments, but I look on the fact that this will give me a better book, one that people will want to read.

I know I might be stepping into some interesting territory here, as this can be a rather hot topic, but I’ll give you my thoughts. Self-publishing is not for everyone or for everything. I feel that if you have a book where the content is good and that people like it, word of mouth will work wonders. Marketing is all about the “snowball” effect.

I did a little game at the online bookstore yesterday and did some asking around to the manager about self-publishing. She says often times most people will not come and go to the kiosk, or even to the computer to look up books, they normally go to them. This store isn’t a small store either, so I was a bit surprised. She continued by saying that there are many good self-published books out there, but ( she added the but) often times, people self-published because they’d been rejected by traditional publishers (or literary agents or whomever) and still wanted their book out. They are close to their books and don’t want to change much, at all.

I asked about editing and the self-published book: she smiled a bit and said, if they took time to check the editing would have got them published. She was quick to add that it could also be the self-publisher not taking care. She said from what she hears the self-publishers don’t do much more than copy edits. She also said that there are times when she sees mistakes in a traditional published book, but this doesn’t happen as often. There is a balance there where people have people who have people checking the manuscript for any mistake.

My Question for you today is this: Does my bookstore manager have a point about the self-publishing industry, and editing in that industry?