Do you need an editor?

Yes.

I don't care how smart you are or how brilliant your use of the language may be, you need an editor. I consider myself  pretty adept at English grammar, punctuation, and sentence construction. My mother was an English teacher and she had thumb screws at home for any child caught committing a grammatical error.

Look at this randomly selected page from my latest book, The Man on the Istanbul Train after my brilliant editor, Chris Roerden, got through with it. I thought it was perfect when I sent it to her. She strikes out superfluous words, reorders clumsy phrases, and reminds me to make ellipses non-breaking. Most people don't know what a non-breaking ellipsis is, let alone how to avoid breaking one.

But more important, an editor sees where you need a sensory image, where a character isn't behaving as that character would, and where someone's using a cell phone he lost in the last chapter. An editor will tell you you have too much backstory when your best friend won't.

I think we, who are moving into the world of epub, must be careful. When the publisher of my Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries, Five Star/Cengage, produces a book, they do the editing for me. I pay nothing for that service. Writers, let's not let the standard slip. Cough up the money and get your book edited. Polish it until it shines.

BTW, the preceding blog wasn't edited by anyone.