Every kitten needs a loving home and every author needs an editor, but how do you find the good editors in a world where plenty exist but not all of them do a good job. A Google search will come up with many options, so how do you find which one will be best for you? The answer is simple: Read the editor’s testimonials and see what their clients say. Ask yourself: do the authors say how it is to work with the person? Are they happy with the result and their overall experience? What kind of work did the editor do on their book? Does this sound like the kind of person you’d like to work with?
After reading the testimonials, take a look at the editor’s blog and check out the tone of the writing. Again ask yourself: does this sound like the kind of person I’d like to work with?
There’s nothing quite like testimonials from happy clients to make me feel that I’m right where I’m supposed to be in my life – helping authors make their books the best they can possibly be.
Testimonial
I just received this one from Pete Trewin who wrote Not Without Risk.
Thanks Pete.
Let no one mislead you. You can self-publish a book for next to nothing on Createspace but to self publish a good, well-written book that will gather positive reviews on Amazon and from rated reviewers and bloggers, you will have to shell out. Not a huge amount but maybe a thousand imperial British pounds or so. You will need a professional structural edit, a good cover and a copy edit. I was rubbish with computers so I had to pay for formatting of the ebooks as well. I self published my first two books – A Fair Wack and Time Lapse, garnered some good reviews, sold a few copies and gained accreditation from Awesome Indies – a fantastic not for profit service that provides the validation every self published author needs as meeting mainstream publishing standards of quality (if you’re good enough – not everyone who applies meets their standards). It was there I heard about Tahlia Newland who set up Awesome Indies and who had moved on to be an editor in her own right.
“She appraised the manuscript of my third book Not Without Risk then carried out the structural edit. Tahlia is a talented author in her own right and she instinctively knew what I was trying to do with the plot and characters and helped me achieve it. Tahlia is also fantastic with the line edit – improving the prose sentence by sentence. She has written a highly rated book on this – ‘The Elements of Active Prose’ – which I strongly recommend to any budding writer. She then told me about her publishing project which was just getting off the ground and offered to take on Not Without Risk. She provided me with an estimate of cost. I checked on what I’d had to spend on my first two books and it was in the same order. Now I am a wary creature by nature and have read all the horror stories about Vanity Publishing on Writer Beware. A quick google brought up nothing but praise so I went for it. The book has gathered a lot of good reviews from rated reviewers and bloggers including one on Amazon USA which said ‘very well developed characters, nicely painted scenes and exceptionally clean editing make this a book a joy to read.’ Now if that isn’t a testimonial, what is?”
Kitten?
Why the picture of a kitten? It’s Mani Moon one of my Burmese cats when he was a kitten. I thought his expression matched the idea of looking for something. I also just thought you’d enjoy it. Let’s face it, he’s pretty cute.
This is what he looks like now:
This is not entirely irrelevant either. What’s the link? I can help bring your book to it’s beautiful maturity. 🙂
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