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Prices may have changed. This article was originally published in 2019

 

If you’re an indie author, you may not have much of an editing budget for your book, and to spite the plethora of authors and editors telling you that you need professional editing services (probably theirs), you’re never going to be able to pay for it. I understand. If I waited until I had the thousands of dollars I needed to hire a professional editor (other than myself), I’d still be saving money, and I wouldn’t even have my first book published. The bottom line is – You gotta do what you gotta to in order to get your books to market. However, that doesn’t mean you should publish a book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo or Apple Books that is just plain subpar and full of typos. Instead, you should do what you can to fix major and minor mistakes and punctuate your book correctly. To help you with that task, there are plenty of great writing and editing books that are under $5.00USD.

1. Show, Don't Tell Kindle Edition

This book offers a quick read at 73 pages and is available as a kindle download or via kindle unlimited. It's currently .99 cents, and is meant to be an extremely quick editing guide.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but so much more when the picture is an abstract one instead of a description with no wiggle room. That wiggle room is the gap that keeps readers engaged in your story. This book will show you a way to keep your book fresh, intriguing, and most important of all not boring! By bringing together internal, and external voices in combination with beats, you will not recognize your story afterwards.

 

 

 

2. The Tidy Guide to Self-Editing Your Novel: The clutter-free, 30-minute course for polishing your book without going crazy (Tidy Guides 2) Kindle Edition

This editing book is .99 on Kindle and 48 pages.  The intro gives you a glimpse of what it's like to get feedback from an editor for the first time, and I would imagine this book contains some lessons involving that encounter.

The Tidy Guide to Self-Editing Your Novel brings you a no-nonsense approach to revise and polish your book. In this guide, you'll learn how to…

    • Self-edit your novel with a calm, motivated mindset
    • Polish your story so that it shines above the competition

  

 

3. Polish Your Fiction: A Quick & Easy Self-Editing Guide (Writing in a Nutshell Book 2) Kindle Edition

This book is available on KIndle for $2.99.  It is 120 pages and is designed to help you polish your fiction manuscript.

In Polish Your Fiction: A Quick & Easy Self-Editing Guide, writer, editor, and publisher, Jessica Bell, offers her tried and tested advice on the quickest and easiest ways to polish different areas of writing style, consistency of prose, grammar, punctuation, typography, and layout. Each section is armed with a numbered checklist for moments when writers need that “at-a-glance” reminder and nifty Microsoft Word tricks that will save time. At the end of the book there are also magnificent accounts of editorial mistakes other authors have made during their careers, to show that no matter how many times a book is edited, something always slips through, and to therefore not be so hard on oneself.

 

 

4. The First Five Drafts: Prevent Over-Editing and Get Your Novel Done Faster with the Five Draft Method (SC Writing Book 1) Kindle 

This book is $2.99 and offers 69 pages on how to draft your novel.

This is the no-fluff, serious writer's guide to getting your novel started, edited and finished.

The five draft method is designed to help you reduce your chances of over-editing, which can stall your writing process and cause you to either never deem your novel finished or ruin it in any number of ways, including inputting too many slow sections, taking out all the interesting details and doing too much ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’.

In this writer's self-help book, you will learn how to write your first draft and revise your manuscript to the point where it's ready for self-publication or submission to agents and/or publishers.


The Five Draft Method

Draft 1: The Junk Draft 
Draft 2: The Structuring Draft 
Draft 3: The Rough Draft 
Draft 4: The Analytical Draft
Draft 5: Final Draft 

Plus! Proofreading for Publication

5. The LionheART Guide to Editing Fiction: US Edition: A Self-Publishing Guide for Authors Kindle Edition

This editing book is $3.00 and 75 pages, so it is a quick read.

The LionheART Guide to Editing Fiction US Edition is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to editing fiction in Word 2010. It covers common problems and how to fix them as well as instructions for specifically editing in MIcrosoft Word.

Karen Perkins of LionheART Publishing House has helped over a hundred books come to publication in the past year alone, and whilst there are numerous comprehensive grammar guides out there, it is not always that easy to pick out the elements that are most useful to us as authors of fiction.
There are two options for getting this right: hiring an editor or doing it yourself. This guide is for authors who want to be intimately involved (and in control) of every aspect of their book. I wanted to compile a tool which is simple, easy to use and full of tips to help you decipher the punctuation and grammatical rules and apply them to your own work – without drowning you in information – whilst paying attention to current trends in the publishing industry. The areas I have highlighted are the ones I come across most often when editing and I also detail the method I use when editing and polishing a manuscript for publication.

6. Common Mistakes Writers Make: Editing and Proofreading (Writing With Excellence) Kindle Edition

This editing book is $3.29 and offers 57 pages of writing advice that covers some cmmon writing mistakes that all fiction writers make. the good news is that most of them are easily correctable once you know what to look for.

The first thing a reader or an editor — whether acquisitions or content — sees when they open your book to page one is your best effort at what you are trying to say. Fiction or nonfiction — doesn’t matter. If your writing is weak, sprinkled with grammatical errors, and plagued by shifting points of view, most readers and editors will not turn to page two. In this short book, best-selling and award-winning author Eva Marie Everson explains how to:

* Fix weak introductions
* Find grammatical errors
* Remove irrelevant details
* Replace weak words
* Understand and write to your target audience
* Avoid big words
* Create a sense of place
* Understand the difference between "rules" and "styles"
* Avoid POV shifts

and much, much more. 

7. How to be a Fantastic Writer Kindle Edition

This writing book is 130 pages and sold as an Amazon Kindle for $4.99.

How to be a Fantastic Writer leads you step by step from beginning to end. If you’re just starting out and want a solid framework to give you confidence, or if you are a seasoned novelist who wants practical advice on how to inject tension into a scene that inexplicably seems to drag, then this is the book for you.

 

 

 

 

Read More on Drafting Your Novel

 

  1. The Minimalist’s Way to Start a First Draft ...
  2.  Best Approaches to Start a Second Draft ...
  3. Writing the Third Draft of a Fiction Novel ...
  4. How to Write the Fourth Draft of a Fiction Novel ...
  5. How to Write the Fifth and Final Draft of a Novel ...
  6. How Many Drafts Should You Put on a Fiction Novel? ...

Read More from Stacey Carroll

 

AVIA2FUllCVerADAVIA ii: Bullets and Betrayal Kindle Edition

 

Greg Locke is the detective who thinks he can put away both Avia and Benton in the next book in the series Avia II Bullets and Betrayal. These two are very close to going to jail or going on vacation to Hawaii when their heist goes bad. They are stuck in a life of crime, and they cannot seem to get out. Thriller author Stacey Carroll tugs you through all the twists and turns of these two and their lives while showing you that crime can pay in the worst ways.

 

 

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