I’m halfway through reading an inspiring ebook called Write. Publish. Repeat. The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success. In the section on editing and self-editing, the authors Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant), lay out their practical advice which will prove useful to most self-published authors:
We suggest you employ the 80/20 Rule. Get good editing, but don’t worry about perfect editing. Get a good line editor, hone your own ability to self-edit, get a few beta readers, and call it a day. Do an 80-percent job using 20 percent of the potential cost and time so that you’ll still have the remaining 80 percent of time and money and can use it to create and publish more books.
The message of the book as a whole is clear: the most important task of the writer is to–surprise!–keep writing.
Perfection may well be your worthy goal; and it behooves you not to let it block your moving forward. But nowhere do the authors recommend skipping the step of editing. How intensive a job you need depends on your skills and support you may have from others. You may be married (like the author of the above statement) to an excellent proofreader. You may have put your book already in front of a number of beta readers. You might be an expert in grammar, syntax, and punctuation, but know nothing of formatting.
Your time and money, if you are devoting much of your life energy to writing, is a precious commodity, so use it wisely. Assess your work with open eyes and ears, and see where it most needs work to reach its final state of polish.
If you’re unsure of where the remaining weak spots are in your work, and need a fresh set of eyes, send me a sample and I’ll respond with a free assessment.
Until then… keep writing!
–Nowick Gray