As the partner of a copy editor, I'm intrigued you think this is inexpensive, because she's been doing this for years for PhD and scientific papers, and the book she did took a lot longer and cost several thousand dollars at her below market rate. Admittedly it was for an english as a second language author, but my observation is that for a work of any significant length, copy editing is not cheap. For a self published book, it might exceed the revenue: you'd have to sell thousands of copies to recoup the copy edit cost.

I guess I write fairly well; I'm a professional writer by most definitions. By copy editor I mean someone who mostly just fixes spelling and grammatical errors--and maybe flags stuff that doesn't make sense. When I hired a copy editor for a book, I paid a few hundred dollars to someone who had interned for a magazine editor friend of mine.

I don't doubt that even a few hundred dollars may exceed revenue for a lot of self-published works. But I'd argue that someone needs to do a careful read-through of a book. You simply don't see mistakes after a while and most friends just aren't going to do a careful enough read through for free even if they're otherwise qualified.

Well, I think you're right about needing a fresh pair of eyes. And, as a pro writer you probably made less mistakes than most.

You paid low-to-below market rate to an ex-intern early stage career and I compared to a 20+ year proofreader in academic for ESL. Probably fishes to bicycles. I think you got what you needed which was a light touch confidence spellchecker.

A new to writing solo author, bursting with ten years of bildungsroman, who got Scriviner and has dumped two thousand disjoint paragraphs of prose into word...

> You can hire someone to do that though--along with cover design etc. And publishers often don't do an awful lot of heavy editing in my experience.

I bought and read a few self-published books on Amazon. The lesson I learned was that you should never, under any circumstances whatever, pay for a self-published book. The average quality of writing is atrocious.

Publishers may not do much direct improvement of your writing, but even if they perform a purely censorious function of printing good writing and refusing to print bad writing, they're adding a lot of value.

(And my understanding is that they do in fact work with you to improve your writing, but I have no experience in the field.)