A Crisis of Self-Confidence

I know someone who obsessed for a month over where to take her car for maintenance. She'd pick a spot, change her mind, begin researching more alternatives, finally settle on a place, then begin questioning her choice, then...

MAKE A DECISION!

This acquaintance reminds me of a recent Reddit post in r/self-publish. The author had hired two separate editors, then another one on Fiverr, then bemoaned the fact that he/she couldn't entirely trust the feedback from any of them. And now what was he/she to do?

Setting aside the fact that editors are wildly expensive, this much angst over publishing a book? It's insane.

Most developmental editors charge by the word. The industry standard is 4 to 8 cents per word for an experienced editor, so for a hypothetical 60,000-word novel (which is short), the author is laying out between $1,800 and $4,500. While I'm sure freelance editors can be found for less than that, it's still going to be a chunk of money. Now multiply that times three.

Either this author has zero confidence in his/her work or they are looking for an editor to declare the manuscript "perfect". The latter is never going to happen, and the former is a sure sign that it's time to choose a different profession. 

As you know, I've never once hired an editor. I have nothing against them, but even laying out $270 for a book cover was a big expenditure for me. And to be frank, I trust myself more than I would trust a stranger. When it came time to edit my latest novel, I knew its weak spots exactly. Good grief, I'd lived with the story for over a year--I should know. There were three: the opening, a dull middle section, and one poorly laid out passage. I managed to fix two out of the three. Could I have benefited from an editor's guidance on the third? Sure. But that wasn't an option. The novel has still managed to average 4.7 stars, so I can pat myself on the back for doing a pretty good editing job.

And here's the thing: Sometimes a bad decision is better than no decision. A self-published book can always be revised. Just upload a new manuscript if you decide to make changes later. Maybe a couple of bad reviews signal some weaknesses. Go ahead and fix them if you feel the need.

Way back in my early supervising days, I had an employee (a very nice person) who often couldn't decide how to adjudicate a particular claim. She'd ask me, I'd offer my advice, she'd go back to her desk and ponder it some more, debate it out loud to herself, and finally I'd need to get up and leave the area before I said (or screamed) something I'd regret.

The whole time, this song would be running through my head:

The correct answer to this dilemma is, go ahead and pull the trigger. It's really not that scary.

If you can't or won't do it, your entire publishing career will consist of exactly one published book. 

If that.