#108 - How can I find a good editor for my book?

How do you find a good editor for your book? Hi, my name is Shelley Hitz and I help aspiring writers to self publish their books in multiple formats using my publishing map and step by step system so that you can write words that outlive you and self publish books that fulfill your calling. In each of my Ask Shelley episodes, I promise to share at least one thing that will help you write, self publish or market your books so that the message of your books can impact lives. So the question that I received was how can I find a good editor to help polish a finished manuscript? Now we teach the Kingdom Writer's path and we help you progress through that Kingdom Writer's path inside our Signature Membership Christian Book Academy and we have five stages. The first stage is first draft getting that ugly messy first draft out of your head and onto paper. The second stage is finished final draft. This is where the editing takes place. So we recommend that first of all you do a round of self editing. I have a seven step self editing process that I teach you at ChristianBookAcademy.com if you're not yet a member you can come sign up. We have no long term contracts. You can cancel at any time and get started in that final draft module. Because if you haven't self edited your book yet, if it's going to be just a harder process, you're probably going to pay more for editing and so you really want to go through that process first. But once you've self edited your book and you've went through all the steps in our final draft module in Christian Book Academy it includes adding references for quotes, your front matter, your back matter, you know, just all the things like that. Then you're ready to find an editor and we have a blog post for you all about finding a Christian editor. I assume that you're writing some sort of Christian content or that you would like to have someone who is a Christian that's editing your book. If not, some of these tips that we're telling you sharing with you will apply anyways, but you can find it at trainingauthors.com Christian editors and I will also add the link in the description of this training so that you can have that for later as well. But one of the ways that you can find editors is to ask for recommendations. So you can find different writing groups on Facebook and just ask like who do you recommend for editing and why or what book did they edit for you? And you can get a lot of great recommendations that way. Now I don't receive anything for recommending them. But there's also a site called Christian Editor Connection and they have a list of different editors that you can check out as well. And then on our blog post we have several. I have three different recommendations and these are all people that have personally edited books of ours and that I've worked with personally. So you can check them out on the blog post. And then we have even more recommendations in our private member area. So in the final draft module we have a lesson on professional editing and we have even more recommendations and some that are very affordable that if you're on a really tight budget, that might be a good option for you. And then finally in our private group in Christian Book Academy, we have a document where our members have been able to share if they offer services. And so you can also check out that document and if you're a Christian Book Academy member, check out that document in our on our private group so that you can see some other options there. But there's a lot of things to consider when you're looking for an editor and I definitely recommend checking out our blog post. We go through some different steps of number one, do your research. Number two, get a quote from several editors. Number three, good communication is key. And I won't repeat everything that's in that blog post because you can go and read it yourself. But this is really an important step in the process publishing your book because if you skip this step, you could have a poor quality book that goes out there and then end up getting bad reviews. And those will stick with your book for the life of the book. So I really recommend saving up your money making sure you get your book edited. There's a lot of ways you can self edit. There's software you can use to self edit, but ultimately there's nothing that can really replace a human that's editing your work and giving you feedback. So I hope that this was helpful. Check out our blog post trainingauthors.com Christian editors and we would love to have you at Christian Book Academy. You can come join us ChristianBookAcademy.com and we would love to have you there. You'll find a lot more recommendations in our final draft module. I hope this was helpful for you and I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.