I have been speaking about a book of sermons that I worked on with a minister. When you self-publish, you don't have the benefit of an editor to tell you that your book won't sell and this can hurt your sales in the long run.
In traditional publishing, you send your query letter (and sometimes manuscript) to a publishing house and it is frequently rejected. Rinse. Repeat. Until that day when you hopefully get that letter of recognition. For some, they send the first query and get accepted. That is the rare happening, not the normal.
If your manuscript is rejected, you have no way of finding out whether or not it was "good." Out of all my traditional rejections for one of my books, only one kind editor sent me a note stating: "I really liked this and would have accepted it if our publishing house wouldn't be currently booked for two years with manuscripts we are publishing."
Because of this, many authors are often left in the dark about what is wrong with their books and few who self-publish have the money to get professional advice. People who self-publish and do attempt to get outside help, either by paying someone or using beta readers, can run into the vanity press trap: when you pay someone to read your book, they tend to be lax on good advice and heavy on praise. Even beta readers might not want to hurt the author's feelings or may not know what is wrong with the book.
Vanity presses are the worst about this. That is part of the reason why they are nicknamed "vanity" presses. The have the viewpoint that the author is the person who knows best what to do with his or her work. No matter how unsalable you want to make your book, they will gladly print it for you... for a fee, of course, and if you agree to buy those books once they are printed.
It is very important for authors to find a professional to give them good, unbiased advice about their books. This means, as a real author, you must have thick enough skin to know that some people are not going to like your book, and you need to understand when those people are giving you good advice about changes or when those people are stating their opinions and just might not be the right audience for your book.
I can think of one example. One person, we will call him Mr. Big, hired me many years ago to review his "screenplay." He thought it was great and hired about ten other cheap freelancers to also review it. When I bid on and accepted the job, he passed it off as a professionally written, well-edited screenplay in which one production company already had interest and in my freelancing youth, I believed wholly and bid equally low, thinking it would only take a couple of hours to read and review.
The author called me and spent an hour talking about how great his manuscript was and how he was getting it produced by the Navy. This should have made me nervous about the truth of his previous claims. The Navy does not produce movies beyond basic training movies, and Mr. Big had written a feature film. During the course of this conversation, Mr. Big stated that he would be willing to pay me much more if I found something that needed to be fixed, and it took me a little more time to explain.
As might be expected, when I got the screenplay it was a mess. It was mostly formatted correctly, but it had serious issues from typos, to plot inconsistencies, to illogical characters, to rapid cuts that visually would have left any viewer dizzy. Halfway through the film, it changed plots entirely and followed a new set of characters. Most of the characters, despite having different backgrounds, all spoke with the same slang and accent, and most of the dialogue was characters talking about what was happening (i.e. "I have to walk over here right now to pick up these papers on my desk").
The guy had paid me to write a couple paragraphs about the film, but he also seemed deeply concerned that he get the story right. So, I gave an in-depth analysis of what changes needed to be made, puzzled at why none of his numerous other reviewers had pointed these things out.
Needless to say, he called me and cussed me out on the phone. He told me I had no clue what I was talking about. All the other reviewers said his movie was perfect, the character I criticized was another reviewer's favorite, even though I had a theater degree I had no clue what I was doing. He then proceeded to tell me again that the movie was about to be produced by the Navy, and basically that I would eat my words once I saw it advertised on the big screen.
It has been almost ten years since I had this learning experience. I have never seen this movie produced on the big screen or even the small screen. Even if the author eventually took my advice, the script would have needed a serious rewrite by a talented screenwriter.
Basically, this person wanted to pay people to tell him how great he was and how great his screenplay was--sadly that is what most people did. Even traditionally published authors take advice from their editors and make changes for them. It is important to have some input if you want to create a good book.
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