The good old days? When haven't editors been an integral part of publishing? Editing is SOP for writers, but that doesn't negate the need to have an editor enter the picture (proof reading, in publishing terms, is not the same as it is in layman terms btw). What you're talking about when you mention spelling, grammar, and punctuation, is copyediting and the least expensive part of any edit. That's the polish. That's the, "Hey, I've been working on this for months, I'm pretty close to the work, perhaps you can take a look and see if I've missed anything." It's also, sometimes, when checks are made for trademarks, and copyright infringements (i.e. using lyrics to a song without permission... etc). A macro level edit is designed to push the author to make it better. "The motivations are unclear here," or, "If you moved this scene over here it might make this more clear," or "This word feels out of place..." It's a collaborative process that the author has final say on, that helps make the book better. What's a matter of pride, is not hoisting sub-par work out to the public.
Several posts in this thread referred specifically to copyediting. My post was a response to them. Sorry if it wasn't more clear. I recognize the contributions macro level editors make to literature. I've read enough literary biographies to know that Thomas Wolfe probably wouldn't have had a career had it not been for Maxwell Perkins. Perkins also helped Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others. (Susan Bell has an essay on the contributions Perkins made to The Great Gatsby; it's an instructive read for novice writers.) The Paris Review published a feature (they called it an interview, but it wasn't, really) on Robert Gottlieb, full of appreciative quotes from the writers he's edited, like Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Michael Crichton, Toni Morrison, and many others. So I'm not saying macro editing has no value; for some works, it's critically important. I think we're on the same page there.
Fair enough. I guess I look at the copyedit like the final systems check before launch. I pride myself on self editing (not so much in forum posts) but the copyeditor I used for my last mss (self published) really surprised me with how much she found. It cost less than $200 and she caught a number of errors including the fact that I used a line from the Happy Birthday song (which is still copyrighted), that I referenced the Dewey Decimal system at a university library, which is not generally the cataloging system used at university libraries. She also caught trademarks that needed to be capitalized and a few punctuation errors. I study editing. I read the books. I have a subscription to CMoS, I want to learn. But more than that, I want people who spend money on my book to know that I did everything I could to make it an enjoyable read. I want them to know that I value the investment they made in my work, and if they don't like the story, it's not going to be b/c the editing was shoddy. Design and editing, in my opinion are the two areas that should not be skimped by the self published. Now, all that said, I also have an agent. The manuscripts I send him are edited by me. I don't spend money editing those. I polish them as best I can, and off they go. Sometimes my agent catches an error, or a lose end I missed, but usually it's a matter of him reading it, him writing a pitch and out it goes to editors at publishing houses.
what percentage of new and unknown writers do you think get such an advance?... or any advance at all, these days? for the few who do, of course an editor's fee would be recouped from a $10k advance and leave a bit left over... but for the many who don't get any advance, or a much smaller one, what i said holds true... and new, unknown writers would be foolish to count on winning that lottery...
