You could need them, and they could save your hide. If, however, you are quite good at copping onto mistakes and are willing to print out every single last page yourself, then you can painstakingly deal with the editorial process without chipping out hundreds of dollars to just get your book proof-read, and even after this, you might not even get it published.
So, why do so many people flock to editors, to be told what they already know? Because they don't know any better, and the world of writing has scared them away from doing what they want by themselves.
Unless you're with a tremendous author (or publishing) house, and you're a multi-award winning Best Selling author, you need to pay for your edits. And you can do all of this yourself, you could even do it for free if you don't want to go all-out.
So here's a summary of what the editors do:
- tell you that your book is good and/or great
- inform you of it's publishability in the current market
- put in a few capital letters etc
- change the punctuation
Is there anything above that seems super hard to do yourself? The best way to do it is to print everything off, staple it together, grab a few pens and high-lighters and just high-light all the garbage to get rid of, anything that needs a capital, any punctuation, any errors that need rectifying, and anything else. It truly is simple to get published without first getting an editor to check over your stuff. Heck, if you're still in school, you can get your English teacher to mark it - I did before!
