Do you need an editor?
Yes. Yes, you do. No exceptions.
You cannot edit your own book. You are simply too familiar with the text to spot mistakes or areas that don’t make sense. I have a draft of a novel with beta readers right now, and every last one of them noticed that I used the phrase “shouldn’t up something this trival.” Obviously I meant “bring up,” and they all pointed that out. I missed catching that mistake, even though I’d read the book at least a dozen times and am regularly paid to edit other people’s books. I was just too familiar with how I thought the sentence should sound to notice that it didn’t actually sound that way.
More significantly, every last one of my betas commented that my descriptions of building layouts are hard to follow, and that I should rewrite them entirely. This is where…
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