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While writing my book, I oscillated between manic belief in my own abilities to desperation for external help. Less than a month away from my desired publication date, I found an editor. I learned a ton and she greatly improved the quality of the book.

I wrote an article about the experience of soliciting feedback and finally finding an editor who I meshed with.

Feedback is Everything

I’ve spent almost ten years working in a high-prestige, high-competition industry: quantitative trading. It’s secretive and it attracts a lot of special people. As it turns out, many of those people never unlock their full potential—even as compensation increases wildly.

Really, the main difference between “good” and “great” is a healthy feedback culture. Firms and teams that practice radical candor generally are successful, those that don’t have constructive, direct conversations about individual performance waste resources.

The stakes are lower in self-publishing, but observations from my nine-to-fives apply. No structured feedback, whether from a professional editor or your mom, means the product probably isn’t anywhere near as good as it could be.

However, even when faced with feedback, the author must retain some amount of conviction. Imagine I plagiarized Hemingway for a high school creative writing assignment. Would I have earned a 100 on the paper? No. Feedback should be a learning experience. Sometimes it is subjective, sometimes it’s misinformed. Too much reliance on feedback means endless rewrites and erosion of the author’s own voice.

As I finished up Framed and struggled to get feedback from my friends, I started to think that my budget might have been better spent on getting feedback than on promotion. I sought feedback.

Beta Readers… Good Luck!

Pretty much every “new author” guide advises soliciting beta readers for drafts, whether single chapters or a full-length manuscript. Unfortunately, finding these readers and getting “radically candid” feedback from them is really difficult.

The advice that I gave on reddit is crucial: friends aren’t beta readers. They can be, but they have more important things to do. Friendships shouldn’t hinge on homework being completed.

One oft-suggested path is to trade beta feedback with other aspiring writers. It didn’t go well for me. I was attacked in Facebook groups when responding to posts that solicited feedback on writing samples. In private arrangements, I found that the author I was paired with half-assed giving their feedback to me, or there was such a huge mismatch that we just weren’t seeing eye to eye (for example, my nonfiction work being matched with a “billionaire boss fantasy” writer who was not a native English speaker).

I also tried to solicit feedback directly on Reddit in beta reader oriented subs. That didn’t work.

I offered advance review copies to some of my friends on Goodreads. A few accepted. However, there’s no incentive for them to read quickly and, as I write this, I haven’t received any feedback. What I learned here is that it’s much better to solicit feedback chapter by chapter rather than burdening people with huge globs of text.

One site that I found late in the game (after I had hired an editor) was Scribophile. There’s a managed karma-like system that tries to ensure equitable exchange of feedback. If I write another book, I’m going to make a real effort to use Scribophile.

Finding an Editor

Okay, so, forget beta readers. What about a real editor? Although I was ready to open my wallet, it wasn’t easy to find an editor.

To start, I sifted through listings and offerings in writing groups on social media sites. There was too much self proclamation there. I reviewed portfolios and writing samples and I was rarely impressed.

I tried to use Booksy, which helps to match authors and service providers. I absolutely hate the site because it tries to lock everyone into its proprietary messaging platform so they conduct business there and pay Booksy’s transaction fees. The editors on Booksy looked legitimate enough, but everyone I contacted either ignored my messages or said they were too busy. To be fair, this might have been partially because I wanted a full turnaround in under a month.

I checked Jane Friedman’s website and that’s where I had the most luck. I received responses from a few editors and sent sample chapters. Kayla Kauffman, PhD was who I ended up selecting to work through the rest of the book with. She worked quickly and gave helpful feedback on my manuscript. If you find yourself enjoying the book, leave a five star review, then thank Kayla. She brought Framed to the next level.

I found that deep copy editing tended to cost between $0.02-$0.03 per word. Most editors had an intake delay of about ten days, which I thought was totally reasonable. Some were much more backed up, some by two months or more, if they provided an intake date at all.

I Made Mistakes

My editor identified bad habits and straight-up incorrect writing. While I’ve highlight the raw decrease in length as being somewhere between 3% and 4% of the total, it’s important to note that there were very few structural changes. The editor’s work was not developmental, almost all of the shortening was a matter of sharpening my writing.

Some of the notable changes included:

• Capitalization to start quoted phrases
• Cleaning up overly passive writing or adjective
• Reworking awkward phrases
• Creating contractions where I was using an informal voice
• Pointing out logical fallacies
• Highlighting vocabulary reaches (I tried to use the word “ponderance”)
• Removing poor usage of italic and bold text
• Apparently, there’s not supposed to be a space after an ellipsis.
• It’s “home in on” not “hone in on”
• Faux pas and bad practices like embedded references to other parts of the book

I learned so much from the process, and by keeping my original drafts alongside my finalized drafts with assessed comments, I have a valuable learning resource for future work.

Style Versus Correctness

One thing that I considered during the process is that anyone touching my work degrades my voice…to some extent. If I’m using too many adjectives and awkward statements, they’re my adjectives and my awkward statements. However, after a point, there is an objective argument to be made–too much “style” might not make for a positive reading experience.

As readers, we never really get to see an author’s “raw” voice in a long, book-like format. I really wonder about this. A few of the sentences were reformed into phrases that I’d never, ever, type myself. Does that make the work less authentic? Or does admitting that make me something of a dotard?

Was It Worth It?

The manuscript for Framed was over 140k words. The price for copy editing was more than I had budgeted for, but I couldn’t have been happier with the result.

One thing to consider is that editing usually decreases the length of the book. In a world where profit margins are razor thin, single-digit-percentage changes to book length can mean increasing the profit margin while

If you’re writing a book and considering working with an editor, my advice is to pay for a sample chapter to see if you like it. If you’re overwhelmed by the changes and don’t understand some of them, that’s good. That’s how I felt. If you’re trying to assess Kayla’s work specifically, email me and I’ll send before and after examples of any chapter of Framed.

Happy writing!