As every independently published author is aware, gaining traction nowadays in an arena flooded with books is hard. With services providing professional covers to well-written blurbs, it’s getting even harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Accordingly, the one way in which authors can still vie to get the attention of readers is via honest, real reviews. And even getting reviews has no simple or easy mechanism – you can find services where you can pay for editorial reviews, or contact your friends and family, or seek out bloggers that may take the time to read and review your work.
Whether you are seeking to convince readers to read your work or reviewers to review it, one way you can still make yourself stand out is through effective copy editing. Many authors don’t know the difference between copy editing and editing, and although there is significant overlap, and both must be done hand in hand to some degree, copy editing is a more objective process while editing is a more subjective process. That is to say, copy editing makes sure your work is readable while editing makes sure your work is subjectively good. This is why editing is a significantly more involved process, and like the writing itself, depends on the editor for their unique approach.
Copy editing makes sure your work is readable while editing makes sure your work is subjectively good
Copy editing, similarly, requires a creative hand, but is far more objective; if you repeat the same word over and over in four consecutive sentences, or use commas where there shouldn’t be any, or miss some where there should, copy editing will catch this. It serves to engineer the actual lyrics of your work to ensure that the consumption of it is as easy as possible.
And though this seems like a simple, obvious process, we at Editors Weekly often find that many independent works lack sufficient copy editing. This is one of the first criteria we use to determine whether we will review any given work, as at a baseline, we hope and expect that any author that is serious about publishing will take the time to either copy edit their work themselves, or hire someone to do it for them.
Here are some additional resources for you to get more of an understanding of copy editing:
