Why Your Book Should Be Evaluated Before Going To Market

Have you ever purchased a product that didn't live up to its promise? You probably felt disappointed and wanted your money back. A book is a product, and recently I have read three that left me feeling like it was a waste of time to read them. If you own a store, you want quality products that will bring more satisfied customers. If you ask a store to sell your product, you would not ask them to sell something that is broken or missing parts. It is the same way with bookstores. They do not want their shelves filled with books that are of poor quality. This is one reason they typically do not purchase books that are from publish on demand (POD) companies. Many of these online companies will accept any manuscript from anyone. They don't ask you for a marketing plan because they know that the money they make on a book is not from book sales; it is from the fee they charge up front to publish your book.

Even if the POD produces a nice cover and quality binding, they probably won't ask you to hire an editor to improve your book. In fact, most don't even offer editorial services. Therefore, they don't expect your product to be of high literary quality or fly off the shelves of bookstores. POD companies have a bad reputation and as a result, authors have a hard time getting their books on the shelves of major book retailers.

Traditional publishers want manuscripts/products that are ready to publish. They don't have time or money to invest in your manuscript in order to bring it to a saleable level. Yes, saleable within the publishing company, not to retail readers. When your book comes to the acquisitions editor of one of the major publishing houses, someone has to believe in your product enough to move it up the line to the person or committee that will be reviewing the book for its sales potential and overall quality. If an editor can't "sell" your book to her boss, your book will not be chosen for publication. A manuscript that lacks literary quality has: numerous typos, grammatical, spelling, and other mechanical errors such as verb agreement, shifts in tense, inconsistent voice, and poor sentence structure. It may need more development of characters, better set up of plot, improved transitional paragraphs or a more logical flow of information. Manuscripts like these are not likely to reach an editor's publishing list.

Most mechanical errors are caused by the author's lack of knowledge about correct usage rather than a lack of concern for correctness. Correct usage is very important and goes a long way to help a reader make sense of a writer's work. Even if you got all As in English, and are good at grammar and spelling, it does not make you an editor. By the way, As in the previous sentence is intentional since it is the plural of the letter A. A's is the possessive case of A, and that is not what we wanted. A professional editor understands formatting, front and back matter, book structure, indexing, and is able to see your manuscript in a fresh, new way.

Let's say you published your book through a POD, or perhaps you self-published and did not have an editor or a professional critique of your book before you released it to the market. You have sent out hundreds of copies asking people to review the book, but you can't figure out why no one is responding. It could be that the topic of your book was uninteresting to the reader, or the way the story was told was confusing or didn't flow well. Perhaps the book contained so many mechanical errors that the reader was too frustrated to continue reading it. Even if they know enough about writing to critique a book, your friends don't want to hurt your feelings. If they didn't like your book well enough to write a review, they don't want to lie about liking it. They will probably hope that you avoid mentioning the book when they are with you.

Another reason to hire an editor or get an evaluation of your book before you publish is to save you money. In the long run, you have a good chance of getting reviews on a well-written, entertaining book that has wide market appeal, and we all know that reviews sell books. If you don't have a quality product, you won't have high sales no matter how much you market your book. There is no guarantee that you will sell enough books to substantiate the time and money required to market a book, but having an inferior product lessens this opportunity even more. Why not have a professional edit and evaluation of your book?

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