Cannibals Know It - Commas Save Lives

BooksontheBeach – ‘Cause that’s my idea of a dream vacation

Indie authors are afflicted with a severe sickness. They have been bitten by success, the heady knowledge that they have accomplished a great thing: they set out to write a book and they wrote it. How many times have you heard someone say that they’d like to write a book? LOTS of people would like to write a book (what stops them?). But most never get down to the gritty, grinding, time-consuming business of outlining, writing, and above all, completing a manuscript.

So indie authors do what most only think about doing, and having accomplished this great thing, they feel like they can do anything.

But no one can do it all. Most indie authors (most authors, actually), can’t edit their own work. It is the bane of the indie publishing world that having conquered one mountain, indie authors are convinced that their personal reserve of literary acumen is enough to carry them to the top of the next. They are wrong. Their prose may ooze with cleverness and their story may be solid, but typos, misspellings, empty nouns, excessive modifiers, misplaced prepositions, missing punctuation, and weirdisms on every page trip them up repeatedly—and that’s not even touching on structure, theme, plot, and dialogue.

Editors. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they DO serve a purpose. They see the weirdisms authors miss; they make sense of nonsensical things that are clear only to the author; they keep authors from embarrassing themselves in a very public way.

I once got fired from an editor position only because I was determined not to quit first. I knew the firing was coming. Why was I so fired up (sorry) about not quitting? Because the tech-geek whose work I was editing referred to editors as those “people who push commas around on a page.” Really? What cannibal wrote this?

LET’S EAT, GRANDMA.

Or is it,

LET’S EAT GRANDMA.

See, commas save lives.

Indie authors: Treat your infection with a healthy dose of editorial antibiotic. If you can’t afford the services of a competent editor, before you release your magnum opus at least put your manuscript in front of several trusted friends, ideally people who read a lot. When you keep hearing the same comments, good or bad, rest assured that your friends see what you cannot. You’ll be glad you fixed your work before its weaknesses are described in blistering detail in online reviews.