Why are freelance editors so awful?

It’s my firm belief that evil does exist, and there is a VERY slight difference between innocence and evil. Innocence is when you do something without knowledge, good or bad. Should a child crack an egg in your shoe, he’s really innocent. He doesn’t know any better. Should that child crack that egg while having a solid FIRM understanding that it is morally wrong, that little **** is evil.

Indie Editors, you’re nearly all that same little ****, in other words, I find the majority of you to be evil.

Here are 6 types of evil editors. And it must be 6 because otherwise, that wouldn’t be poetic. You are evil if….

  1. You carry no qualifications to edit, yet you do so anyway. I use the term ‘edit’, rather loosely. Your excuse? You’ve edited somewhere some time in the past and got a compliment or two, so that is all the qualification you need.
  2. You are a ‘published’ author who suddenly finds yourself in a sea full of indie guppies, ripe for the picking. You’ll lend your ‘expertise’ and call it editing. Never mind that when you were published, you hadn’t edited your novel alone.
  3. You are a ‘good’ reader, and therefore, feel that you know what it takes to edit. You conveniently ignore the fact that you yourself cannot write worth a damn. You basically have no idea what you’re doing. But you need the cash, so no harm no foul.
  4. You can edit, you’ve edited for a real company, but with prices so low, you have to maximize your time. That means b*tching up a manuscript or two (doing an ‘all right’ job), just to get to the others as fast as you can. Time is money.
  5. You are strapped for cash and you take to ‘editing’ as a means to pay the bills. You can edit, and you edit a few parts well, but eventually you mismanage your time and end up having to rush the rest, rendering the entire edit useless since you weren’t in any way thorough.
  6. You edit but you’re just NOT very good. Let’s face it, in every field there will be those who are good, and those who just really aren’t that good. If editing were a sport, you’d come in last, maybe. Point is, you are just terrible at what you do. You’ve been called terrible, yet you continue to waste people’s money on your shotty services. If you were a whore, you’d basically be giving your customers an STD. Or in some cases, multiple STDs. Or worse yet, you do a half decent job but leave behind the major things that need work because you can.

Listen, it’s easy to scam people, and this IS a scam, and it’s a big problem. You are bringing the entire indie world down. Yes, some people will publish as is after calling on your ‘expertise,’ but others won’t. Others will be forced to rehire yet another yahoo who might or might not eff things up. It’ll discourage still more from seeking out editors. The indie world is overfull of bad works, but the saddest part of all? A lot of those works had actually been ‘edited,’ by evil little ****s.

Thanks a lot for the VD. No wonder it burns when I google….