I’ve been talking to a lot of authors this past week on the value of editing their work. So I went to the net and searched for some good places to find editors and I came across the Editorial Freelancers Association (www.the-efa.org).

On this website, you can find the following types of freelancers:

Abstractors
Copyeditors
Designers
Desktop publishing experts
Editors
Indexers
Manuscript Evaluators
Picture researchers
Project managers
Proofreaders
Researchers
Textbook development editors
Translators
Writers

If you are a frequent reader, you will know I am a strong advocate of making your book a profitable venture. To do so, you need to carefully plan out how much money you will spend printing your book and getting your book ready to print. This is why I generally recommend authors print just 250 books and use any other funds they have to get their book professionally edited.

In my opinion, the key ingredients to selling your book, whether non-fiction or fiction, are:

A well-written book
A compelling story (or compelling concept if non-fiction)
A story (or concept) that has an audience
An attention-grabbing title
An attention-grabbing cover design
And content that is well-edited with zero spelling and grammar mistakes

This list may be overly simplistic, but these are the key ingredients to selling your book, whether you self-publish or mainstream publish.