Why I Won't Edit Your Book

The other day, I was talking to a newer writer who wanted me to go through their writing and explain how it could be improved.  I outright refused and they were unhappy with that, but we were interrupted and I didn't get to explain why I wouldn't do it.  So, instead of explaining why to that person, I'm going to explain why to you.

1. I don't know what your audience wants.  I know what I want, but there are loads of books for sale in bookstores with posh book deals that confuse me.  Sometimes I sit in the bookstore between the sci-fi and fantasy shelves and I will read the back of every single book that I haven't seen before.  There are four or five shelves and six bookcases.  There's a set like that for fantasy and another one for sci-fi and from all those books, I can find one or two that I'm interested in reading.  If a novelist sits me down and tells me their great idea for a book, I'm more than likely to say, "Well, it's not doing it for me, but who knows who's out there who will like it?"

2. I don't want any responsibility.  So imagine that I told someone their idea was rubbish and five years later a book with a similar concept goes completely viral?  Yeah, I don't want that level of responsibility.  A lot of the books that have gone viral in the last 20 years also confuse me and I haven't read them.  If someone came up to me and told me their idea was Hunger Games, I'd advise them to go into therapy so they could forgive their mother rather than write a toxic, contrived book.

3. Editing on a smaller level is demoralizing.  When I do my own editing, I don't keep track of how many changes there are per page until I'm on the third round.  On the third round, there are between 14 and 25 changes for every 500-word page.   And that's AFTER the final draft, content editing, and a round of proofreading.  At that point, I have no idea how many times I've gone through it to try to improve it and I'm basically insane.  If I wasn't the one doing the editing, I'd kill whoever told me there was a single error in my manuscript.  HOWEVER, I know from experience that removing every error is impossible, so before I killed the editor, I'd fall to the floor, cry, and swear off writing.  I don't want to be part of that experience for another person.  Thanks.  I'm good.

4. There's nothing in it for me. I wonder how much money it would take to get me to want to involve myself in this sort of thing.  It's basically blood money in my opinion, so how much?  The number keeps rising in my head and I keep thinking of how I would feel spending that absurd amount of money. I would feel gross even after all of it was gone.

5. My friendship with the author is more important to me.  I wasn't close to the person I was talking to, but I still don't want to do something to piss off someone who knows the world of writing.  They could follow me around for years and leave terrible reviews for my writing until one of us died.  They could still bash me after I was dead.  Bitter writers are worse than ex-lovers.  

So that's it.  Write what you want.  That's my advice.  If you can look down at your book and be proud of what you made, then who's to say you're wrong?  You made what you set out to make and that may be the pinnacle of success.