Have at least three other professionals read the entire manuscript. These need to be people who will give you brutal, honest, unbiased opinion (Mom and Uncle Fred don’t count). Some writer's groups MIGHT help, but there should be at least a few published authors in the group, to get decent feedback.
If you have submitted your manuscript several publishers and/or agents, submit many more times before you give up. This will give you the better—read “potentially actually profitable”—deal with the least amount of investment and the best return for you.
If you've submitted and been rejected without comment too many times to count, you need to find out WHY it was rejected before you put more money and time into self-publishing. If there's a problem with your manuscript, putting it out there for no one to read and no one to pay for will do nothing for your reputation or your life savings. Perhaps you've just been doing something wrong on the query or the submission process (for example, submitting a cozy tea mystery to a publisher that only publishes tough-guy-dick mysteries), but the manuscript rocks. OR, perhaps there's a major issue with the plot, characters, or something else that will make it a flop no matter what you do or who reads it.
It is vitally important to know what issues you're dealing with BEFORE you try self-publishing.
I always warn writers—especially new or previously unpublished writers—away from self-publishing, because there are so many issues and problems an inexperienced writer will never anticipate, and because so often unpolished writing gets tons of money wasted on it. If you really want to take the self-publish route, be prepared to invest MORE and to wait even longer. AND, once it's self-published, it has NO chance of getting picked up by a major publisher (speaking from experience here—there are too many legal and marketing issues to the trade publishing companies if they take on a previously self-published book).
You will NEED a pro editor to go over the manuscript (you might want to do this anyway, even if you end up only submitting to the trades). This is usually fairly expensive, depending upon who you get to do the work, for the edit portion alone (that’s a THOROUGH edit involving lots of contextual comments and the like, not just a spell-check). Then, after the first round of changes, you will need another round of edits and changes (inevitably, whenever you make changes, things can get more messed up, or there might be other problems that were missed the first time around).
Then, on top of THAT big cost for the edits, you’ll have MORE expenses— the typesetting, artwork, marketing (HUGE bucks for successful campaigns), etc.
Remember, if you, your Mom, and your best friend are the only ones who think it’s ready for public consumption, then it certainly is NOT.
Yes, it's your precious baby that you've slaved over for countless hours, and yes YOU think it's just perfect, but I promise that you've stared at it so long that you can no longer see some of the problems with it. NO writer can best edit his or her own work.
If you want to be able to call yourself a professional, you need to ACT like a professional—make sure your writing is polished, BEFORE you expect to get it published, whether that be by a trade publisher or e-published on Amazon.
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