Tl;dr: Yes, I do.
My 18th book is scheduled for release this November.
When I first began chronicling my road to getting it published - after losing both my agent and my editor - the question I heard over and over again was, “Why don’t you just self-publish?”
Though the majority of my books were traditionally published, I did self-publish two titles, “Getting Into NYC Kindergarten” and “Getting Into NYC High School.” I vigilantly proofread both efforts. I used spell-check and grammar-check. And, still, the books came out with typos.
Now, I’m not saying that typos are ever OK. But, because these two books were non-fiction, I hope the information I have to impart is so valuable that my readers will overlook a gaffe or two.
Fiction doesn’t work that way. A misplaced modifier or misspelled homonym can yank you out of a story with such force that you can never quite fall under its spell again. And, for fiction, that’s deadly.
Before submitting my 18th book to potential agents and publishers, I vigilantly proofread it over and over again. I sent it out confident that it was the best job I could do.
And there were still mistakes in it.
How do I know? Because, after it was acquired by History Through Fiction, my new editor sent me back a marked up document. Full of mistakes I’d let slip through.
I diligently sent back the corrections he’d requested. And then I sent in additional corrections of my own.
The problem with repeatedly re-reading a document in the same format is that your brain becomes accustomed to reading what you thought you wrote rather than what you actually put down on paper.
Both my editor and I went through my MS-Word draft and thought we’d caught all the errors.
But then he sent me the galley proofs, which meant reading it again with a fresh eye for the new format. I found more typos. He found more typos.
He sent me the final document before it went to print. I read it again.
You guessed it - more typos! (And I’m not even counting the stylistic changes I made. There has never been a manuscript I’ve reviewed in galley form that hasn’t made me question why I thought I could write. Or, more importantly, why anyone else thought I could write well enough to give me money for it.)
Now it looks like the book is set in stone. Not that I think that means it’s flawless. I have never re-read a published work of mine years after the fact without finding at least one mistake which slipped through dragnet after dragnet.
So to answer the question of “Why don’t you just self-publish?”… it’s because I need an editor. Desperately. (I explained why I am reluctant to pay for one, here.)
You’d think that, after 18 published books (not even counting the non-published ones), I’d know what I was doing.
This Literal Literary Loses is at least savvy enough to realize that no, I do not.
Oh, and I have a comma problem. I am an over-comma-er. Seriously, it’s like a 12-step level problem. (Hello, my name is Alina and I can’t stop comma-ing.) Just ask the editor who has tried to wrestle me into shape for over 20 years now. Also dashes. I use too many dashes to connect words that don’t want to be connected (see: over-comma-er, above). And run on sentences. And fragmented sentences.
I definitely need an editor. (I’ve also been told I end too abruptly.)