Note: This post is part of my seven-week series about the mistakes people make when writing a book. To read from the beginning, start here. Is it possible for a book to be over-edited? I believe it is. Many authors, in their quest for elusive “perfection,” struggle to let a book go at all. Whether it’s a matter of sending it to a publisher or agent or hitting the publish button on Amazon, the temptation to read it over “just one more time” can paralyze many authors into inact

Note: This post is part of my seven-week series about the mistakes people make when writing a book. To read from the beginning, start here. In this age of self-publishing, many readers complain that authors publish without editing. Often the authors accused of this heinous crime will reply publicly--often with a good degree of frustration--that they did, in fact, edit, or that they hired someone to edit, or some other variation on that theme. So what’s the truth? In my experi