Why You Need an Editor for Your Book
I jot down the title of this post and already I can visualize groans and eye-rolls. Because I’m an editor - writing about why you need an editor. It’s like a mechanic writing about why you need a new transmission, or a plastic surgeon writing about why you need a nose job. Right?
Except get this. The whole reason I’m an editor in the first place, the reason I spend my days (and sometimes nights) sifting through mountains of text in search of errant commas and dangling participles, is the same reason I spend my free time devouring books from a precipitous pile on the nightstand: I’m a reader first. I’ve always been a reader first.
I jot down the title of this post and already I can visualize groans and eye-rolls. Because I’m an editor - writing about why you need an editor. It’s like a mechanic writing about why you need a new transmission, or a plastic surgeon writing about why you need a nose job. Right?
Except get this. The whole reason I’m an editor in the first place, the reason I spend my days (and sometimes nights) sifting through mountains of text in search of errant commas and dangling participles, is the same reason I spend my free time devouring books from a precipitous pile on the nightstand: I’m a reader first. I’ve always been a reader first.
And let me tell you - there’s a LOT of writing out there these days. More than ever before. It almost goes without saying that the advent of the internet, of websites and blogs, of self-publishing and ebooks, has made publication more accessible than ever before.(1) Self-publishing has become a powerful equalizer to the insatiable greed of corporate gatekeepers. I think it’s a beautiful thing. But for both a writer and a reader it’s a double-edged sword: now, with an unprecedented volume of reading material to choose from, how’s a reader to choose, and how can a writer possibly rise to the top?
The reader in me scoffs. Sure, there are mountains and mountains of publications out there. But honestly, a shocking number of them are just plain bad, and sometimes all you need to do is read a page or two to see that things aren’t as they should be. You can’t put your finger on it, but the writing comes off as amateurish, as unpolished, as cringeworthy, as cliched, and it doesn’t take that long at all to separate the wheat from the chaff.
You don’t even need to produce amazing prose to be better than most of what’s out there: all you have to do is not suck. And as a reader even more than as an editor, I really, really want the writing that’s out there not to suck. I have a vested interest in both sides of the issue.
But look, you object: surely that just means I have to become a better writer! There’s a wealth of material out there, from books to instructional posts to writer’s workshops to college classes, all designed to make me a better writer - that’s obviously how to improve my writing!
Yes, to be sure, that’s true. But I’m not even necessarily talking about your writing here - I’m talking about the finished product. You can pick any famous writer you can think of, the most genius of genuises, and I’ll admit right away that their prose sparkles and their words leap off the page and they are surely the best of the best, the most incredible and talented writers in the world. And then I’ll tell you that all of them, every single one, to greater or lesser extent and for better or for worse, has had their prose prodded and tweaked at some point by an editor (and usually more than one).
I could write ad nauseum about why this is the case, about how an editor’s job is to represent the reader and the reader’s interests, about how an editor is trained precisely in the art of not just fixing mistakes but improving prose on the whole, about how there isn’t a grammar-fixing app in the world that can truly emulate the desires and tastes of a human reader, but eventually after enough piling-on of evidence you’re going to start getting suspicious again that I’m trying too hard to convince you, that my vested interests are showing through, so let’s make it simple and empirical and to-the-point.
All you really need to know about why you need an editor is summed up in something called the mere exposure effect, elsewhere known as the familiarity principle. This effect, studied across disciplines and cultures and even species can be summed up as something along the lines of: the more a person is exposed to something, the more they tend to prefer that thing over other things. It sounds intuitive and blindingly simple, but there’s a ton of interdisciplinary research on it showing that it’s a “phenomenon that cannot be explained [merely, I’ll add] by an appeal to recognition memory or perceptual fluency.”(2) This thing runs deep. It’s wired right into us.
As a writer, you don’t just get attached to your characters and your ideas. You get attached to the very phrases and words you put on the page. It’s almost worse if you’re an overzealous self-editor, because the more you read your own prose, the more you tend to fall in love with it, and the more difficult it becomes to put yourself in the shoes of a reader and look dispassionately at what needs to be done. This is why you need an editor. This is why most big publishing houses use more than one, because even an initial editor’s familiarity becomes such that they can overlook glaring problems, and so at the very least a separate editor is enlisted for the final proofread.
And this editorial attention to detail is the single greatest thing separating the professional texts from the amateurish, the good from the bad, the instantaneous rejection from the harder, closer look. If you’re serious about your writing, if you want it to be taken seriously, and if you want it to be as good as it can be, then I don’t care if you’re the second coming of George Eliot or William freaking Shakespeare. You need an editor.(3)
Brock
1 You can google this until your fingers fall off and your brain melts in despair, and there are different numbers all over the place, but something in the order of four million books were published in the US alone in 2019, of which almost half were self-published, and this total represents an increase of about 1000% from 2007 (since which year book sales, lamentably, have actually declined).
2 R.B. Zajonc, “Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 10, No. 6, Dec. 2001. A nice, readable introduction to the subject. See also this pretty comprehensive article from the Decision Lab.
3 This whole time I was looking for somewhere to plug this in and I didn’t find it, so I’ll just say it down here: even a professional editor, someone like myself, perhaps, who also likes to write, needs an editor. It has nothing to do with your experience or how “good” your are at writing or editing or anything like that. This familiarity thing is a pervasive aspect of our psychology, and affects everyone equally. If you write, you need an editor, and that’s all there is to it.