As a self-published author, you’re responsible for a lot things on your own that would be taken care of for you if you went the traditional route. That’s good, because it means you have more control, but it also means you have a lot of expenses up front, before you ever earn a dime from your books.
One of the most important expenses is editing. It can also be one of the most costly, particularly if you dump a first draft on an editor and they have to clean up all of the things you should have already handled.
You can and should get friends and family to read your manuscripts and give you feedback, but that won’t replace doing your own diligence with finding weaknesses in your writing…and fixing them.
That can be a difficult thing to do – after all, there’s a reason for the famous “kill your darlings” advice for writers. We fall in love with our own words and deleting any of them feels downright murderous.
But you CAN learn to tighten up your own writing, before passing it off to an editor. One way to do it is to become someone else…your own writing teacher. That’s what’s suggested on EnchantedMarketing.com in an article entitled “How to Spot 8 Weaknesses in Your Writing (and Fix Them)”
When we become our own teacher, we can be both kind and tough, and perhaps it won’t feel quite so deadly to trim the fat.
For more help on fixing your writing:
Get Your Freestyle Author’s Quick Guide to Grammar, Spelling, & Punctuation Fundamentals: Help with your self-editing and proofreading, including basic pointers on common mistakes, and quizzes for helping you to become more adept at finding those errors.
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