Comment Re:Gonna sound snarky.... (Score 1) 327
The vast majority of texts that authors give us are incredibly poor. Our editors have an extremely hard job of cleaning these up and rewriting them so that they are generally understandable and professional and are correctly targeted for our audience. To our established authors, we also offer them an advance on their work.
I'll second this. I once read a book published by the author on a vanity press. Although the content itself was good (and the writing was not too bad), the formatting looked like it had been done by a 10-year-old. Much of the text was either bold or underlined or italicized (and note that those 'or's are NOT exclusive ors), to the point that it was almost unreadable. Had it been formatted by an adult, I might well have purchased several copies to give to friends. As it was, I did not manage to read the entire book - the formatting was just too awful. Editing is NOT the same thing as writing. A good editing job is worth money.