If your goal is to hand out a few copies of your book to family and friends, you probably don’t need a book editor. If you want to do anything else with your book, however, not hiring a professional editor is a big mistake.

You’ve already invested months, if not years, attentively and lovingly crafting your book. You can’t rely on your word processing program’s spell checker and/or your friend the English major as your manuscript editor if you are planning on submitting your book to agents or publishers, especially if you want it taken seriously. If a traditional publisher picks up your book, they will have book editors on staff to handle the editing. If you submit an un-edited manuscript to any publisher or agent, one rife with grammatical and syntactical errors, your work will be in the circular file after just a few pages are read.