Post Objective:

Share edit related experience and provide list of resources.

One of the major challenges to an indie author is editing – in my opinion.  You may be lucky enough to know someone who is qualified and willing to review your work, but if not (or in addition to) I suggest you do what I did and hire an editor.  I will also mention here that not all editors are the same.  There are technical or reports editors, but what you are looking for is an editor who has experience editing novels.  They must know how to deal with dialog and other challenges presented in this type of work.

A resource I highly recommend is Guru.com - this is a site that matches freelancers and employers.  I cannot say enough about this site – I relied on it throughout my publishing venture.  It works like this -

• You create an account,
• create your project (describe what you are looking for),
• put it out for bid. 

You can also search freelancers and check their rating and the type of work they have experience with and view examples of their work (depending on the type of the work they perform).  You can open the bid worldwide, U.S. only or even limit it further.  You can communicate through the site and will have allotted space for sharing files or you can communicate directly by email.  You can utilize the escrow feature for payment.  I used this site for an editor, my book cover and a webmaster.  I hired Susan Andres  as my editor, her price was very reasonable and her turnaround time was very good.

Another step in the editing process is the pre-read.  Hopefully you can find willing individuals who will read your proof.  Depending on your own process you may want to work in the pre-read before and after the edit.  Depending on your expected audience, I suggest that you have both male and female pre-readers.  In my case I am a female writing a novel with a male lead, therefore I wanted to get the opinion of a male reader as to how I represented my lead character.  Keep in mind editors are not usually perfect so pre-reads after the editing is suggested.

Other editing tools were mentioned in the “Phase I – Reference books” of this series, but I’ll re-list them here for reference:

Editing (the writer’s desk reference) -

• Grammar Desk Reference, Lutz & Stevenson
• A Writer’s Reference, Hacker
• Writer’s Thesaurus, Oxford American
• Self-Editing for fiction Writers, Browne & Kind
• The Elements of Style, Strunk and White