I’m an author with 3 books in a series coming out next year. So far I’ve written and turned in 2 and am working on my third. Every book I’ve written has been longer than the one before it. This is NOT because of my editor, who has been everything wonderful in the world and worked very hard on the books I’ve given her. It’s because I’m writing larger, more complex books as the world gets bigger. I’ve noticed that most series books operate this way. It seems to be a natural progression as the reader and the writer become more intimate with the created world, and want to do more with it. Doing more often means more scenes, more twists, more plot, and (naturally) more words. This makes for longer books whose length has nothing to do with the presence or lack of editing.

Also, hopefully as they write authors do get better, necessitating less editing… HOPEFULLY being the operative word :D

Just wanted to throw that in.

- Rachel

I subsequently met the author at a local writing workshop. I knew she was in the process of writing a second book. So, without any intention of offending her or her story, I subtly “recommended” that she use a different publishing operation. I told her that there were a lot of errors in the published copy. She told me she was going with a different publisher (though she didn’t acknowledge or ask me about the types of errors).

An editor/ copyeditor easily would have caught all of those annoying goofs.

Instead of remembering her book as “a good read,” I now only remember it for being the one with all the typos and story mistakes.

Let’s face it. Too many places and people have replaced their editors with spell checkers. I’d e-mail them a list of errors but it is a little late when the book is already published.

But who cares? If a film makes money, that’s all that matters.

Big-time publishing is a business. Quality always loses the battle against profits.

Inexperienced writers do not realize that a professional writer or editor can – easily – spot a first or early draft. It is clear when the writer is still figuring out the story or hasn’t reread the piece to correct for flow, continuity, and cohesion. If you can’t be bothered with creating the best possible experience for your reader, do you think your reader will truly enjoy reading you?

Editing is an unsung art form because when done well, the results are invisible. You never hear someone rave, “WOW! The editing on this book is phenomenal.” You only hear it when the job is NOT done properly. It’s distracting to the reader when this is the case, and pops them out of their immersion in the story for a moment. So yeah, editing is necessary, the step that makes a reader forget they are simply looking at a printed page, and lets them experience a well-conceived tale more fully.

Yes, we can look for the things that worked – compelling story is certainly one I’ve heard Twilight has – but we cannot assume that we can get away with making the mistakes that they made because it worked for them. We can not count on achieving what Meyer and Rowling achieved because their success had as much if not more to do with ungodly luck than with anything else. I would happily bet that there are many, many unpublished books with all the merits and far fewer of the flaws, and they will never be published because they just weren’t in that magical place at that magical time. It’s tough. It’s life. If you want success you need to dig in, work hard, bleed and sweat and cry and realize that no matter how hard you work, sometimes it just isn’t enough.

It’s kind of funny because the theme of Twilight seems to be that one can achieve happiness without doing any work, that a prince charming will swoop in and save you from your tedious life, that you can be a passive participant in your own story and things will turn out okay. That’s a great fairy tale, but it’s not how things work.