Look for the Helpers
Find the Folks You Need to Help Your Manuscript Shine
Before I Get Started
I would like to cordially invite you to read my flash fiction story, “Assistance,” which is out now in the new sixth edition of The Quiet Reader magazine. I’m proud of the amount I was able to say with very few words, given (as all Shelf Life readers and recipients of emails from Catherine know) brevity is not a strong suit for me.
Okay, on with the regularly scheduled programming.
Welcome to a Shelf Life unlike any other. Just kidding, it’s exactly like all the others. I’ve done a lot of writing posts lately so today is an editing post. All writing and no editing makes manuscripts dull as dishrags.
The title of today’s Shelf Life is lifted from a Fred Rogers quote:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Now, I do not mean to belittle the news cycle because there’s a lot of scary stuff in there, but you know what else is scary? Writing a manuscript and sending it out into the world. I have no advice beyond Mr Rogers’s statement above to help you digest the news but I do have expanded advice for scared and discouraged writers.
Writing is terrifying because you have to put your ego into it while holding yourself open to feedback and criticism, at least to write anything good. Also, as readers, most of us consume material that is been polished to a glossy finish. Before a manuscript hits the shelves at a place like Barnes and Noble, it goes through various rewriting, revision, editing, and polishing stages with the writer themself, their peers, their beta readers, their agent, their acquisitions editor at the publishing company, the production editor, copyeditor, and proofreader—and often multiple instances of any of the above.
When we sit down and write, though, we generate raw text. No matter how slowly and carefully we go, nobody is putting down draft words with the level of quality and polish found in a book that’s been through dozens of sets of professional hands.
Thus, it’s an ordinary occurrence for a writer to review their draft text and say, “Oh no, this isn’t anything like as good as the books I’ve read that I aspire to compete with—I’m awful!” That’s legit discouraging. It’s very difficult to judge the quality of your own writing, too. Most people—I include myself—think we can do so but almost no one, maybe no one, can. It’s like a psychiatrist or a therapist trying to diagnose themself. It’s just not possible to be totally objective and clinical when the subject matter is so close to home.
The good news is, there are always people standing ready to help with your manuscript. Some people do this work for trade in kind (you help with theirs and they help with yours); some people do this work for money (they make their living this way); and some people will help out for the love of reading (but these folks are rare).
Let’s talk about who these folks are, where and how to find them, and what they can do to help your manuscript. I’ve divided the helpers into four groups:
Your writing peers;
Early readers;
Editorial service providers; and
Production service providers
These are the people who can help you take your manuscript from first draft to polished and published, whether you choose to go the self-publishing or trad-publishing route (read up on different publishing models in Choose Your Own Publishing Adventure). If you elect to go the self-, vanity-, or hybrid-publishing route, it’s likely that the cost of editorial and production services will fall on you (either in cash up front or as a dedication against future royalties if you go with a hybrid press). If you publish with a traditional publisher, the company will absorb the cost of editorial and production services as part of their P&L. Whichever route you choose, the services and process are pretty similar.
Critique Partners
Critique partners and writing group members are your peers in the writing process, fellow climbers of manuscript Everest. If you can find good critique partners, they are invaluable. If they are experienced at critiquing, they deliver helpful feedback on your manuscripts at the earliest stages, pointing out what works and doesn’t so you can make laser-focused progress in revision. On top of that, critiquing the manuscripts of others is one of the best ways I know to improve your own writing; I often think I learn just as much from the critiques I do for my peers as I do from others’ critiques of my work.
But wait, there’s more! If you’re working with peers who work in the same medium (novel versus short versus poetry, and so on); in the same genre (romance versus sci fi versus literary, for example); and at the same level of skill and experience as you, then they’re likely to provide essential “networking” intelligence, too. Which editors are opening anthologies? Which journal just turned away their story but might be a good fit for yours?
Critique partnership is a relationship that just can’t be purchased. A great way to find critique partners is to join or start an in-person or online writing group. If groups aren’t your speed, there are matchmaking groups and forums available online to help you find a peer to grow with.
Beta Readers
Beta readers are amazing. These folks can be found anywhere, everywhere, all the time. That’s because no editorial or writerly qualifications are needed to be a beta reader—just a love of reading, some time to devote to it, and a willingness to be direct with feedback.
Beta readers (as I discussed in-depth in Identify Your Beta Readers) should represent your real future readers—the people you hope will be the audience for your finished product. These are not necessarily your writing peers or your friends or family (although they could be, if you’re cautious). These are people who read a lot of the kind of thing you write and will read yours in an early stage (pre–final draft) and give you notes on what’s working and not working for them.
Beta readers can be people you recruit to do this for free (perhaps out of their love of reading or because they owe you a favor) or people who provide this service for a fee (you can find beta readers on gig sites like Fiverr and Reedsy, among many other places). I hesitate to say you can also swap beta reads with other writers because that’s really more of a peer critique relationship—your fellow writers are not broadly representative of your future reading audience; most of that audience won’t be made up of your peers.
Editors for Hire
After you’ve taken the draft from first to final it’s time to bring in the big guns. If you’re shopping your manuscripts to agents or acquisitions editors, those folks will fit this bill and, if you land a contractual relationship with one, will provide this service for no money up front.
I hesitate to say this editing is free because that’s not true. You don’t pay money out of pocket for it. In the case of an agent, you pay for their editorial feedback (and the many other services they provide) through a percentage of your royalties that is shared to them. If you sign with a publishing company, you pay for these editorial services in the sense that you have traded the right to earn money from your intellectual property in exchange for editorial, marketing, production, sales, and other publishing services.
If you’re going the self-publishing route, it will be up to you to seek out these services if you wish to avail yourself (and your manuscript). Who are these folks and what services do they provide? They are the editors who provide developmental edits, story edits, structural edits, line edits, and even copyedits (although copyediting typically falls under the production umbrella). They may also provide manuscript evaluations (which can help you identify the marketing potential for your manuscript if you’re not sure what you have on your hands) and help with drafting or editing ancillary materials like your synopsis or query letter.
You can read more about the types of editors, what they do, where to find them, and how much they cost in What to Expect From Every Edit.
Production Pros
Finally, if you’re going the self-pub route, you’ll need to think about production helpers. If you’re trad publishing, production’s still going to happen, the publisher will organize it, you’ll be asked to do things like review your cover and read proofs, but you won’t have to manage the process and you won’t have a lot of control over it.
A side note: To a lot of nascent and emerging writers, that sounds terrifying: “You mean the publishing company is just going to do all this stuff without consulting me and all I can do is say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to what they give me?” But let me tell you a secret that I learned over the last fifteen-plus years of being a production editor, which is this: By the time production rolls around you will be so sick of looking at this manuscript that you won’t want much or anything to do with production. You’ll already be drafting the manuscript after the manuscript that’s in production now. Many times I have sent typeset proofs to an author and said, “Okay here are your typeset proofs, last chance to look at the book before it goes to press, please review and send me your corrections” and the author has said, “Do I have to?”
But anyway, if you’re not with a trad publisher, you’ll have to think about which helpers you may want to enlist to work with you on things like laying out the proof pages (if you are going to have a print component; not needed for e-only), designing the cover, drafting your marketing copy, managing your book metadata, securing an ISBN (you don’t need one if publishing on Kindle only), proofreading your book before it publishes, and so on.
All of these services are readily available for a cost, and all of them are things you could do yourself with a little elbow grease. You could lay out your own proofs, design your own cover, proofread your own proofs—but I don’t advise it. The expertise that professional designers, typesetters, and proofreaders bring to your manuscript can make all the difference between a final product that looks amateurish and one that looks like it belongs on the shelf next to King, Clancy, and Martin.
If money is tight (when is it not?), you may have people in your social circle who can help you out with advice or a trade of services. For instance, people who have experience with InDesign or even Microsoft Publisher can make short work of simple book proofs while a person without that experience would spend a lot of frustrating hours trying to figure it out. A second person lending their eyes to reading your final proofs for typos and mistakes, even if they are not a professional proofreader, can make a huge difference in cleaning up pesky mistakes before your book goes live.
I’m all in favor of DIY methods for a lot of things, but when it comes to making a book, it takes a village.
Hey, by the way, if you got your Shelf Life email late last Thursday, I apologize for that. Substack let me know they were having some kind of service outage that paused outgoing emails. I believe there was some kind of supply chain issue. Like the truck that delivers the email ran out of gas and could not afford more, because the price is too dang high. At least that’s how I assume it all went down.
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