With my first book, I walked the whole road a beginner walks, and I paid for every single service: editing, proofreading, layout, cover design, translation into English.
While I was writing my second book, my husband built a service, editroast.com, where you can get all of that done without extra cost. To test it, we uploaded the manuscript, and I got back editorial and proofreading notes in an easy-to-understand format. It flagged the exact chapters and specific spots right away. I did three rounds of these corrections. Every time, there was something to fix — I kept combing through the text paragraph by paragraph, again and again. Once the service's editors marked my manuscript as 92% ready, I stopped. Why not 100%, right? Because my eye had gone numb to it. It was a finished book at that point, and I wanted people to read it as soon as possible. Because perfect is the enemy of good. Sometimes you have to embrace a bit of deliberate "good enough" and put it out there as it is. There's no such thing as perfect — there will always be something you want to fix. I didn't want to fix forever. I wanted feedback from readers.
After all that intense work, I got curious what the service's editors would say about my first book. I knew, of course, that there was work to be done there, but I didn't expect it to be this much. Three full rounds again. After the first one, I deleted whole paragraphs without a second thought, rewrote the foreword, and added new chapters. I spent two days on one chapter alone — about 15 hours. But how it came alive! I went through every single line, three times over. I'm proud of myself, honestly!
A hundred, two hundred, a million percent — if a service like this had existed when I wrote my first book, I would have saved a ton of money and time. What took just a week (granted, without straightening my back once) when I worked on my second book on my own took four months when I worked with people on the first one. Waiting in line for an editor to free up, then working with them (only two rounds), then proofreading, and layout — that was a whole separate saga.
This service works for every writer, without exception. If a writer is going the self-publishing route, they carry a big responsibility to the reader for the completeness of the narrative, the continuity of the storylines, and correct grammar. The service is impartial and cold-blooded in assessing a manuscript — and once a writer fixes every flaw it finds, they end up with a finished book.
If a writer plans to find a publisher and sends the manuscript there, sure, you can hope the editor who starts reading it will make some allowance for the fact that it's not a finished book yet and publishing-house editing still lies ahead. But it's certain that if the manuscript is full of grammar mistakes and the storylines wander, the editor won't keep reading — no matter how brilliant the writer is. Not because the writer is bad or the editor is picky, but because a publishing house is a business. Odds are, the editor will just pick up another manuscript from the hundred others in the same genre.
I'll go further. This service works for a publishing-house editor too, or an independent one. It takes on all the dirty work: verbal tics, repetitions, clichés and worn-out metaphors, unresolved storylines, grammar, spelling, punctuation, style, factual accuracy... Can you imagine? The editor no longer has to clean out the Augean stables of contemporary literature by hand. They get a personal assistant.
editroast.com