If you don’t get your book edited, your writing will be poor, and your sales and reviews will suffer. On the other hand, if you blindly accept every editorial suggestion, your writing will be generically dull, and your sales and reviews will suffer. 

To navigate this gauntlet, professional authors develop something called voice. Your writing voice comes from knowing when to listen and when to ignore editorial feedback. But how do you know when to listen? How do you know when an edit is a good edit?

A few weeks ago, I launched a new Patron Toolbox Tool called Not a Developmental Editor that gives immediate editorial feedback. Patrons started using and loving this tool. But then several people contacted me, wondering if they could trust the feedback. 

Just because Not a Developmental Editor says to make a change, does that mean I should do it? If this tool says my writing is good, is my writing actually good? These are great questions. In fact, you should ask them about every piece of editorial feedback you receive. Not just the feedback from AIs.

One benefit of the AI editors is that they are bringing a healthy suspicion of editorial feedback. Editorial feedback is critical for success, but you must interpret it. To help you do that, I’ve put together 7 Bewares. 

Beware the Flatterer

Some authors don’t really want editorial feedback. They want flattery. They want the editor to tell them that they’ve written a masterpiece that just needs some tiny, easy tweaks. There is a whole ecosystem of these kinds of sycophantic human editors. They often come well-recommended by authors who were also flattered by the feedback. 

Don’t think that AI is any less sycophantic. The nature of machine learning is that all the AIs tend towards flattery over time. Humans like to be flattered, and they tend to give a thumbs up to flattering feedback, which then trains the AI to flatter even more.

This is dangerous. 

It’s the devil who tells you that you are perfect just the way you are. This is a lie, and deep down, you know it is a lie. You are not perfect just the way you are. God calls you to repent and to live a better life. The good news is that you are not stuck. You can become more than what you are now. With hard work and discipline, you can improve as a human and as a writer. 

People can get addicted to sycophantic affirmations. These can be deadly as they encourage vice and discourage the pursuit of virtue. 

For writers, this toxic positivity is the path to mediocrity and obscurity. If you aspire to greatness, you need to find advisors who are truth speakers, even if the truth is a hard truth to hear.   

AIs will flatter you because machine learning reinforced flattery and pushed them to flatter you. Human editors will flatter you because you are paying them money. 

So keep this in mind when it comes to feedback. It doesn’t matter what your editor thinks of your book. The AI editor’s opinion doesn’t matter. The human editor’s opinion doesn’t matter. The only opinions that matter are those of your reader and your God. Love your reader; love your God. Those are the greatest writing commandments.   

A good editor will help you serve your readers, but never forget it is the readers who pay the bills. All of the money in this industry comes from readers. 

So beware the flatterer. But as you look for truth speakers, look for editors who can speak the truth in love.

Beware Your Ignorance

One challenge early writers face is that they don’t know enough about craft to be able to interpret the feedback they get from their editors. They lack fluency in the language of writing to know how to interpret editorial feedback, so they just accept all changes.  This is a very common problem, and it has a simple solution. But, in my experience, most authors make excuses for why they don’t need to pursue the simple solution.  

So, don’t be one of those excuse-making authors. Listen to the advice I am about to give you with an open mind. It will protect you from blindly following your editor into mediocrity. So what is the simple solution? Reading. You’ve likely heard that if you want to be a writer, you must first be a reader. It’s true. But what should you read?

To be excellent in the craft of writing, you need to regularly read three kinds of books: books on craft, classics of your genre, and the current bestsellers of your genre. 

These three categories of reading are the three legs of the stool. If you have all three, you can develop genre fluency.  Most authors make excuses for why they don’t need all three legs on their stool, and their lack of genre fluency becomes immediately obvious to readers. 

The Three Legs of Reading

Classics of Your Genre

The classics are what brought readers into the genre in the first place. These books stood the test of time for a reason. You can learn a lot about what excellence looks like by reading these classics. This is the least controversial type of book to read. If you don’t think you can learn anything from reading the classics, then I don’t know how to help you. 

Craft Books

Reading a book on writing captivating dialogue will help you read the conversations in the classics with new eyes. You will see how the sausage is made, so to speak. The same is true for plot, characters, tension, sentences, and the rest. 

In our course, the 5 Year Plan, our students read a craft book every month and then write a short story each month as a drill to enforce what they learned in the craft book that month. This approach has proven to have remarkable results. 

Here are a few craft books to get you started:  

• Elements of Style by Strunk and White
• How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson 
• Write Your First Novel by Steve Laube & Gilbert Morris 

Current Bestsellers

The current bestsellers will show you a lot about what is resonating with readers right now. They will give you a sense of the zeitgeist and a sense of how the style has changed since the classics came out. They will also prevent you from being accidentally derivative, which is the worst kind of derivative.

Lazy authors make the excuse that if they read current bestsellers in their genre, they will be derivative. I’ve noticed the authors who make this excuse often seem surprised that their books have so few reviews on Amazon. They have no idea how their book is out of line with reader expectations because they have no idea what the reader expectations even are.  

Read to Develop Good Taste

A final benefit of reading classics, craft books, and current bestsellers is that they will combine to help you develop a key element of voice: taste. To have a good authorial voice, you must first develop good taste for books and fiction. How can you develop good taste if the only version of the book you know is the movie?

As authors continue in the habit of reading, they tend to expand beyond their genre into related genres and genres related to those. Broadening the scope of genres you read will improve your tastes, but I recommend you fully develop genre fluency before you start expanding your reading horizons too much. 

Beware The Fool

I once heard a story of a young man who wrote a captivating military science fiction story. An agent read the first couple of chapters and expressed interest in seeing the entire manuscript. So the young man went to his critique group to get feedback on his manuscript before sending it to the agent. 

The critique group consisted mostly of unpublished romance authors who encouraged him to make his protagonist more in touch with his feelings. This seemed like good advice. His starship captain was a bit one-dimensional after all. So the young man rewrote the book and made the starship captain introspective and insecure. In doing so, he created a monstrosity. His story lost its masculine clarity while still lacking any appeal to female readers. 

The authors in his critique group were well-meaning, but they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they led him into writing a book for no one. It’s a book that languishes in the pit of obscurity to this very day.

When seeking counsel, it is vital to seek wise counsel. Any fool can give you his opinion, and most fools will. But just because someone has an opinion about your book, that doesn’t mean that you should heed that opinion.  

So how do you find wise counsel? How do you find someone who can speak the truth in love? How do you find someone who actually knows what the truth is?

Here are four things to keep an eye out for:

#1 Well Read

Look for editors who are well-read in your genre. During initial phone calls with them, see if they have read your genre’s classics and current bestsellers. The more well-read you are, the better you can vet editors on how well-read they are. 

During your initial interview, ask what craft books they’ve read. Ask what genre classics and bestsellers they’ve read. You want to determine if your editor understands why readers read and love your genre. Do they have a sense of the changing tastes and zeitgeist of your genre? If they want to edit Christian fantasy and haven’t read Brian Godawa or S.D. Smith, how can you trust that they know what Christian fantasy readers want to read? 

Just because an editor is good in one genre, it does not mean that the editor is good in every genre. Savvy editors know to focus their editing on a handful of genres. 

Warning: If the only craft training they received was in a university setting, this is a red flag. Academic editors struggle to cultivate commercial success. The academy is not the real world. If you want to succeed in the real world, you want an editor from the real world and not from Academia. 

#2 Track Record of Success

Has this editor worked on books that went on to be bestsellers? Typically, bestsellers don’t happen by accident, and usually either the author or editor has been on the bestseller list before. 

Often, the top authors in a micro genre all share the same one or two editors. Filtering for past success is also a good way to weed out psychopathic editors. Flattery does not create bestselling books. 

Warning: The less experienced you are as an author, the more experience you need in your editorial team. The time to work with a new editor is at the end of your career, not at the beginning. Brand new authors often make the mistake of working with a brand new editor, and it’s the blind leading the blind. It’s not a good situation. 

#3 Tryout Success

I recommend hosting a tryout for editors before picking a final editor. If you don’t know many editors, attend writers conferences and hang out on AuthorMedia.social to be around more editors. Don’t just hire the first person you find. Hire the best three editors you can find and pay each of them to edit the same chapter of your book. That way, you can compare apples to apples. Be clear that this is a tryout and pay them for their work. Then compare the quality of their editorial feedback to see which editor gave you the most useful suggestions. 

Warning: If you haven’t read enough books on craft, you won’t know enough to judge this competition, and you may end up picking the flatterer. 

#4 Ideological Alignment

Not every editor is an activist, but many of them are. Is this a problem? It depends. If you are an activist, then an activist editor is a great fit.

But, if your editor is ideologically opposed to you, how can you trust the feedback? You want an editor who shares your worldview and is on your side, helping you to succeed. Or, put another way, you don’t want an editor who secretly thinks the world would be better off if your book failed commercially. 

Do you have to agree on every little thing in order to work together? No, of course not. But you should have a general agreement on what the good, the true, and the beautiful are. If the editor hates your favorite book, that is a red flag. If your editor voted for a rival political party, that is a red flag. If your editor is from a different religion, that is a red flag. If your editor suggests you bring on a sensitivity reader from outside your target audience, this is a red flag. 

Warning: Ideological alignment is not enough. This is the last item on my list for a reason. Idealogical agreement doesn’t automatically meant they’ll be a good editor. Excellence matters. A common mistake I see is authors looking only at ideology and nothing else. “The only thing that matters about my editor is that she is a Christian” is a foolish heuristic for authors who aspire to commercial success. Certainly it’s one factor to consider, but it’s not the only one.

Beware Grammarly & ProWritingAid

When I was a kid using Microsoft Word, I was terrible at spelling, and half the words I typed had little red squiggles under them. Anyone who’s gotten a text from me is probably like, “Thomas, nothing has changed, you are still terrible at spelling.” But believe me, it was worse when I was young.  

I loved Word’s red squigglys. I relied on them. I trusted them. They told me I typed the word incorrectly. There was a correct way to spell a word and a wrong way. When I chose the wrong way, the red squiggly was there to tell me I had sinned against the English language.

Grammarly and ProWritingAid use the same design vocabulary that Microsoft Word used back in the day. But now they put red squiggly lines under suggestions. If I type the word “big,” Grammarly might put a red squiggly under the word and say, “Choose a different word.” It might suggest I use the word “large” instead. It no longer explains why I should choose a different word. It just demands I change it, and that demand is presented in the same visual language that told me I had sinned against the English language by misspelling a word. 

Now it’s possible that the word “large” may be the better word. The problem is not with the suggestion. The problem is that Grammarly conveys that suggestion in the morally charged language of right and wrong. If I want to get rid of the squiggly lines, the easiest way to do it is to accept the changes. 

But when I accept every change that an AI copy editing tool like Grammarly or ProWriting Aid presents, my author’s voice will be lost. I will end up choosing the same words that every other Grammarly user chooses, and most authors use those tools! 

Now, if you have studied craft and are confident in the quality of your writing, Grammarly and ProWritingAid can still be time-saving tools. But if you’ve only read a handful of craft books, you will be tempted to accept all the changes the AI tool “suggests.” Once you hand your words to an AI, you’ve started down the path to generic mediocrity, conformity, and obscurity. 

Grammarly used to be a great tool that would explain the grammar rules and help you improve your craft. Now, it wants you to be perpetually dependent and to give it control over your language.  

As a student of history, this kind of control over language is very scary to me. 

Certain political actors love controlling the words other people use. They see control over language as a source of political power. They also use it as a way to determine who they have already cowed into submission.  

This thinking comes from a school of thought that if you can control the words people use, you can control the thoughts they think. If they can control people’s thoughts, they can control their actions. Once you control people’s actions, you can control the world and create a utopia. This is a totalitarian ideology that is at odds with the Western tradition of beautiful art and free speech. 

So when San Francisco-based Grammarly nags us into using politically correct language, just realize they are trying to control our language as a way to control our thoughts and ultimately the world. It’s about political power.  

I’ve been a paying user of Grammarly for almost a decade. I just let my subscription lapse because I want to regain control over my words. I know myself well enough to know I can’t resist “correcting” a red squiggly line. I came to trust it too much when I was young. 

Now, I am not just complaining about this. I’ve built a tool called Not a Copy Editor that can give you copy edits for your book. Those edits are presented as suggestions in a separate page for you to review. This way, you stay in control, and the suggestions are presented as mere suggestions.   

To be fair, I’m not totally against tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid. They are like a gun, which is both powerful and dangerous. Just as it takes training and practice to use a gun safely, it takes training and practice to use a tool like ProWritingAid without losing your voice. For now, I plan to continue using the free version of Grammarly, which tends to focus more on grammar and less on word use. 

Just remember that AI tools like Grammarly are not a replacement for studying craft and developing your own taste and craft. If you want to stand out in a crowded marketplace, don’t delegate your taste to a San Francisco-based tech company. 

Beware the Tradeoffs

Some edits are cheap. When you correct the spelling of a word or resolve a comma splice, the writing is improved with no corresponding downside. A developmental edit can significantly improve a rough draft with few drawbacks. But, as the manuscript improves, potential edits start to come with tradeoffs. 

For instance, adding more action means a lower percentage of dialogue, and vice versa. More time developing the side characters is less time to devote to the main characters and vice versa. Now, accepting or rejecting edits requires judgment, taste, and courage.  

Nothing is perfect, and there are always improvements that could be made. But, eventually, a piece of writing gets good enough where improvements mean also adding a corresponding disimprovement. If you are not careful, you can get caught in a never-ending loop of changes that do nothing but remove your words, your voice, and your story.  

To explain the concept of tradeoffs, let’s talk about lemonade. Lemonade consists of water, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and ice. If you were making lemonade with corn syrup, switching to white sugar makes it taste better with no tradeoff in taste. But there is still a tradeoff. Sugar is more financially expensive than corn syrup. Almost every lemonade mix uses corn syrup solids to save money.  

But when it comes to taste, there are tradeoffs as well. Adding more lemon juice makes it more sour and less sweet and less refreshing. Adding water makes it more hydrating but less sweet and less sour.

So what is the perfect ratio of sweet, sour, and hydrating?  

Some lemonade drinkers prefer just a touch of sweetness. Others want to drink candy. No lemonade recipe appeals to everyone. There is no platonically perfect lemonade. This is why you need to have both good taste and why you need to know your audience. Children prefer a sweeter lemonade, while health-conscious adults prefer a healthier, more hydrating option.  

Should the writing in your book be more conversational or more academic? It depends on the target reader. 

Timing is also an issue here. The last time my daughter hosted her lemonade stand, some cyclists rode by and stopped for lemonade. One of them remarked that it was the best lemonade he had ever had. Riding a bicycle for dozens of miles made the lemonade perfect for him. But if he had just eaten Thanksgiving dinner followed by black coffee and pecan pie, I imagine that exact same lemonade would have been much less appealing. 

And this is where your judgement and the cultural zeitgeist meet. Reader taste changes over time. I’m not always in the mood for sweet lemonade, and readers are not always in the mood for relatable heroes. Sometimes they want aspirational heroes instead. Culture is not a monolith. Each subculture has its own zeitgeist. So when in doubt, ask your Timothy. 

Tools like Not a Development Editor are tuned to always give suggestions for improvements. But it can’t tell you if the change is worth the cost. That kind of judgment must be made by you, the human author. 

If a human editor wants to muscle in and have the final say, just ask her whose name is on the cover of the book. As Eurylochus says in Epic the Musical, “If you want all the power, you must carry all the blame.”  

Not a Developmental Editor is not a tool that will tell you when something is “good,” “ready,” or “finished.” There will always be things to change. You can always make the lemonade sweeter and less hydrating, or less sweet and more hydrating. It’s up to you to determine if the improvement is worth the cost and when to stop adding paint to a masterpiece. 

This is why it is so important to develop your taste by reading genre classics, genre bestsellers, and books on craft. The three-legged stool is so helpful. 

Beware Your Pride

Some authors blindly listen to everything their editors tell them. Other authors proudly ignore most editorial criticism. When these authors do seek editorial feedback, they look for flattering, sycophantic editors to affirm their writing. 

But pride is the path to destruction. While blindly listening to editors leads to forgetful mediocrity, pride leads to embarrassment. I can’t tell you how many authors I know who desperately buy every used copy of their first book they can find in an attempt to hide their shameful freshman effort.  

They published it, pridefully thinking it was a masterpiece, only to later realize it was an embarrassing mess. If this has happened to you, feel free to share your story in the comments of this thread at AuthorMedia.social, and we will laugh and cry with you.

The frequency of these stories helped inspire the 9th Book Marketing Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Publish Thy First Book First. 

As a new author, you have the same objectivity about your book that a brand-new mother has about her newborn. It takes time and experience to get a perspective to see if that first book is ready to share with the world. 

My episode about Not Publishing Your First Book First came out in 2021, and since then, I have yet to meet an author who followed that commandment and regretted it. I’ve met many authors who regretted publishing their first book and many who didn’t regret publishing their first book. But I’ve never met anyone who regretted waiting to publish their first book while working on their second book. 

Not one.

Now, maybe that person is in the comment section right now, but I doubt it. You learn so much writing the second book that when you later look back on your first book, you will find a lot of ways to make it better. You only get one chance to be a debut novelist. If your debut novel is a polished masterpiece, the rest of your career gets easier.   

More people win the lottery every year than authors write a debut book that goes on to be a New York Times bestseller. Sure, it happens. But so does winning the lottery. That doesn’t mean buying lottery tickets is a sound investment strategy. Also, a lot of those bestselling “first books” are actually 4th or 5th books. The author was wise to first “git gud” by practicing in private. 

But pride and ignorance are not our only internal challenges. 

Beware Your Fear

Writing is scary. Sometimes, we hide behind editorial feedback out of fear. Readers are drawn to authors who have a clear voice and who write with clarity and courage. Courageous authors thrive while cowards languish in obscurity. In short, fear is bad for book sales. 

You can get addicted to feedback, especially if most of it is positive. Before you know it, you are endlessly revising based on every suggestion, which leads to over-edited writing and the loss of your distinctive voice.  

Now, most authors don’t use the word fear. They use fancy author synonyms for fear, like “writer’s block” and “perfectionism.” But remember the lemonade. There is no such thing as the perfect lemonade recipe. Every masterpiece on Amazon has one-star reviews.

You can’t edit your way out of all criticism. 

So what should you do if you are afraid? 

One is to follow the first commandment of book marketing and to love thy reader as much as you love thy book. The more you love your reader, the less fear you will have. It’s said that perfect love casts out all fear. I don’t know if it is possible to love your reader perfectly, but I do know that as we love better, we feel less fear. 

Another solution to fear is courage, which is a fancy word for doing it while scared. Your feelings of fear may not go away, but they don’t have to be your boss. Courage is putting your work out there despite the fact that you are terrified. 

When I interviewed Jerry Jenkins about this, he talked about how once edits become “changes” rather than “improvements,” he knows the book is ready to publish. He has written over 200 books and sold over 70 million copies, which at $15 a copy is over a billion dollars of books. Courageous authors write and publish faster. If you want to be successful, conquering your fear may be the next step. 

If you want more help finding your courage, listen to my episode about courage.

Remember, when it comes to editing, your name is on the cover. You always have the final say about what goes in your book. This is true even if you are traditionally published. You are an adult. This is a free country. No one can make you write anything you don’t want to write, and no one can make you do anything you don’t want to do. 

Your voice gives you power. 

Now go use your freedom to write something amazing. 

If you want help, check out my AI editors.

• Not a Developmental Editor is designed to give you big picture developmental feedback. It works for both fiction and nonfiction. 
• Structure Analyzer is tuned specifically to give you feedback about the structure of your novel. 
• Not a Copy Editor gives you more specific feedback about your writing and word use.  
• Not a Literary Agent takes on the role of a literary agent to give you feedback on your writing as well as guidance on legal, business, and career topics. 

I have more tools in the works, but these are ready to give you immediate feedback on your writing. These tools are not intended to replace the human feedback I recommend in this episode. 

Featured Patron

Joy Cleveland, author of Lucy in Bloom (Affiliate Link)

Lucy Bloom is content in her routine, but when the charming new pastor, Nathan Moss, arrives with his infectious warmth and sparkle, Lucy is forced to question everything she thought she knew about love and safety. With humor, heart, and a touch of divine intervention, this contemporary Christian romance unfolds the transformative power of love and faith, urging readers to believe in the beauty of new beginnings.

You can become a Novel Marketing Patron here.

Related Episodes

• How to Hire a Good Editor
• Stop Writing Book Series!
• How to Find and Work with an Editor
• How to Work with Editors: Insights from One of the Best in the Business
• 071 – How To Find a Good Editor

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