My official recommendations for pros in the book industry

UPDATED FOR 2024

Looking for professional services to bring your next book project to publication?

Here's a list of the people I've found who do excellent work:

Author Analytics, General Tools, and Data Collection:

  • ReaderLinks aka Author Helper Suite

  • I’ve been using ReaderLinks for at least 7 or 8 years now (as of 2024) and cannot recommend it enough! Get all your data in one place, track detailed sales breakdowns, and finally know what promotions work and what is a waste of money. Insanely helpful.

Formatting:

Editing:

Proofreading:

  • The editors I mentioned above can proofread just fine, and I have one recommendation for a proofreading grammar specialist. Email A. J. Maruna (ajmaruna@gmail.com) and tell him I sent you. His prices are exceptionally good, and he does excellent work.

Covers:

Logos, Designs, Book Trailers, and Author Merch (like t-shirts, stickers, things to sell or giveaway at convention booths, etc.):

  • Brad Lark (blark@blark.com) is the only person I’ve found so far with reasonable rates for shirts and general graphics work. Shoot him an email. You can see some of his portfolio here. And you can check out his full website here: Flying Pork Apparel.

ARC Services:

Email List Management / Sending:

  • I’ve used a couple different services, and MailerLite is the only one I currently recommend.

Looking for a publisher?

My own services are back!

  • After a couple years of focusing elsewhere, I’m back and offering some writer services once more.

Want your service to be featured?

  • Too bad. I only feature services that I’ve personally used and found to be exemplary. You can’t pay to be on the list. (Alright, well… at a certain number I won’t say no, but you’ll need to at least be paying a few of my mortgage payments before you catch my attention)

 

What a cheesy picture…

What a cheesy picture…

Working with professional editors

My friend edits books. I pay her. She's professional, right?

Probably not.

Just because someone edits books for money doesn't necessarily make them professional. And yes, I know that just getting paid technically elevates one from the amateur to the pro status level, but that's not what this article is about.

The difference between someone who edits full time and someone who edits as their side gig:

  • Part time editors are typically very cheap (in comparison) as they need a high volume of clients to build their name and portfolio. For the part time author, that might work out just fine. But for serious writers looking to replace their day job income, we need to look elsewhere.
  • I've read dozens and dozens of stories of part time editors missing deadlines, returning less than ideal quality of work, and ghosting clients altogether. That's obviously unacceptable.

So a full time pro editor won't do that?

Nope.

Here's the difference I see more often than anything:

  • Working with a full time editor means your project is how they pay their bills. That means your work gets done, and it gets done on time and with a high standard of quality the first time. 
  • Life can't "get in the way" for a full time editor like it does so often with part time editors. I've read countless stories of people saying things like, "my editor took 6 weeks to return my book, and I found 22 typos in it! Help!" or "my editor got sick for 2 weeks and can't work on my project, who should I send it to now?"
  • Full time editors certainly have things come up in life. Death in the family, tattoo got infected, lost all their teeth in an MMA fight, whatever it might be, but that doesn't slow them down for weeks and weeks like it typically does to a part time editor. That's the main concept I've seen a lot of entry-tier writers getting confused. If you want quality work done on a professional timeline with no random delays and a 0% chance of ghosting, you have to go with someone professional. Also, the quality should just be better. But that's a topic for another day.

Some guidance when editing

A COUPLE WORDS ON EDITING

A two part series on editing and working with an editor.

 

Part 1: The debate between 'track changes' and comments.

Alright, so if you've worked with multiple editors, you've probably seen multiple styles. The first pro editor I ever worked with used track changes. The manuscript was trash (my first novel. It was honestly horrid.) so there were just thousands and thousands of corrections. The editor used track changes, which gives you a quick option to simply 'accept' the edit or not. You click a button and the edit is made exactly how the editor made it on the manuscript, then you move on. For my first manuscript, one riddled with errors, I spent about 2 days applying the edits. I read most of the changes before I clicked 'accept' on about 99% of them. Long story short, the novel still sucks.

Using comments: you've seen the little comment bubbles next to a manuscript. Google Docs and MS Word both support the exact same format. My second professional editor used comments, and that's all I will accept from an editor now. Let me tell you why.

Comments taught me how to be a better writer. 

When I used track changes, I just sort of mindlessly hit 'accept' on almost everything. Then when I wrote my next book, I made all the same errors again. The same damn errors.

When I read comments from my editor, I have to read the whole comment to understand what the issue is with the sentence. Then I have to read the sentence I had written to figure out where / what the error is. Then I have to make the correction myself and delete the comment. It takes far longer to do, and that's great. When I see the 4th comment correcting the same comma error, for example only using a comma before a coordinating conjunction if the following clause is independent, I learn how to write correctly. Now I don't make that mistake in my manuscripts. Well, ok, I make it every now and then, but not often. 

Learning how to be a better writer is the #1 most important thing you can gain from working with a pro editor. 

Part 2: A couple pet peeves I see in a lot of indie writing.

You might recall an article I wrote a long time ago regarding the word 'this.'

Here's an expansion of my thoughts from that article. Consider the following sentences:

1. She laughed at all this and walked on.

2. They fell into his trap. He had planned this to happen just the way it did.

3. They crested the hill by the lake. Now he had them in his sights.

4. Sixteen penguins pecked savagely at the helpless hunter. He tried to defend himself from this, but it didn't work.

5. Trump and Obama finally found the lost WMD in the cave they were currently exploring.

We'll take these sentence one at a time. It should also be said that I made all of them up off the top of my head. Obviously. They're terrible. I would never write that garbage into a book. Well, maybe something close to #4, but that's it.
 

Sentence 1: If you're a good storyteller, the reader should know why she is laughing. She knows Hillary just lost the election. You mentioned the TV in the previous line, right? Saying "at all this" is just redundant. We know why she's laughing! A better line 1: "She laughed, turning her back to walk on." - Still not wonderful, but you get the idea. Don't tell the reader everything. Tell them just enough.

Sentence 2: You don't want to say: "He had planned the trap" or anything like that because "trap" would be repetitive. As it stands, "this" is redundant with "his trap" in the previous sentence. You have a couple options with sentence 2. Perhaps try something like: "He had planned everything flawlessly." You get the idea. We already know about the trap, so don't tell us about the trap again.

Sentence 3: A little deviation from 'this' commentary. Time stamps. Unless you just finished with a memory / flash back / flash forward / something else similar, you don't need to time stamp events. Of course it is happening currently, I'm reading it currently! Just cut the time word 'now' and you have a better sentence. 

Sentence 4: Another instance where 'this' (plus 'from') could be cut to drastically improve the writing quality. I'm not going to point fingers, but I saw that exact construction in an indie horror novel I read recently.

Sentence 5: Another redundant time expression. Unless you have the story being told by Sarah Palin as a memory of that spelunking expedition she did with Trump and Obama, it doesn't make sense. Just remove the time expression and you improve the sentence. And yes, I read something almost identical to #5 not too long ago. Different characters though. Sadly...

Hopefully everything here makes sense. Oh, and do a quick Ctrl+F search on 'this.' You won't find it outside being specifically called out. You can write good fiction—and non-fiction—without using the word.