As some of you may know, I am going to be a panelist on e-book publishing at the Virginia Writers Club annual writers symposium, Navigating Your Writing Life. Becky Mushko, author and panelist moderator, asked if I would mind posting both a Q&A of my self-pub experiences and a resource sheet I put together for the participants. Hopefully, both attendees and non-attendees should get a kick out of some of the answers and some mileage out of the resource sheet.
One of the challenges facing indie writers is how to recreate the editorial support that a traditionally published author receives (or is supposed to receive). If you take your writing seriously, having a handful of volunteer readers isn’t enough; you need true editorial help.
There are many types of editors, however: substantive editing, line editing, copy-editing, proofreading. All of these steps and stages are important, but in my own case, I felt that there was no substitute for substantive editing since it requires a high degree of experience, knowledge of the genre I was writing in (crime fiction), and a kind of understanding of the whole project, not just individual pieces. Consequently, I hired my own at considerable cost and it was worth it.
Since I don’t live under a money-tree, however, I hoped to cut a few corners by looking for proofreading alternatives. This is still an important step, but one I hoped I could look for a more automated solution.