It's back to school time for many people. For others, there is great rejoicing as with the kids away, there is finally time to get to work on your new novel!
Writing a novel, a book, even a story, is great fun but also a lot of hard work.
Many people don't realize how much work is involved in taking a piece of work from your mind and turning it into a published piece that others will buy.
Your best friend can be your editor.
Most books that go through traditional publishing routes will see one to five editors along the way. This is a lot of people who will look at your work, disect it, and "make it good;" good enough to expect others to pay hard-earned money to buy it.
Self-published authors need to think carefully about their own route to the bookstore shelf. The savvy self-published author will hire a team to "make it good" and it can be daunting to decide who to hire for these many and varied tasks.
A self-published author at the minimum should have the expertise of a professional working editor for at least one draft. This should be someone who isn't related to you and who has experience in editing. Sure, your friends can share if the story is funny or scary or makes sense. An editor will help you understand how and why a scene may or may not work. An editor will help you keep your tenses consistent, and keep "head-hopping" to a minumum. An editor can point out where the tension gets lost or if there are lot of "facts" that simply aren't necessary.
Scarlett Editing offers many services for the self-published author.
We can prepare a book report, which is an overview of your work.
We can do line-editing which is the most detailed and expensive service that we offer.
We can do a variety of edtiorial services that fall in-between.
Scarlett Editing focusses primarily on editiorial services but we are happy to provide leads from our professional network for other services.
You may also need to hire book designer, a cover artist, and publicist and there are a great many talented people who are ready to help you with those services as well at a variety of companies aimed towards the self-published author.
An editor is not a publisher.
An editor is not a publicist.
An editor is not a formatter.
An editor is not a lawyer and can't give you legal advice.
An editor is not a cover artist.
An editor is not an agent.
An editor can not guarantee that your book will ever sell at all but we're going to try our best to give it the best possible chance to fly off the bookshelf.
You can contact Scarlett Editing with any questions: sephgiron@gmail.com
