My mom says my manuscript is amazing! Why should I bother hiring an editor?

I can't tell you the number of people who have contacted me about editing, and who, when they discover it takes time, effort, and--yes!--money to do it, seem to vanish into thin air. I can only assume they've been inexplicably transmuted into a cloud of pungent vapour and blown away on a breeze.

But seriously, people like me exist for a simple reason. And this is it: your writing needs work. Probably a lot of it. No one can simply sit down and turn out flawless writing with the wisp of a smile and not a single bead of perspiration. If that person existed, he or she would probably be universally hated. But let's stay on track here. The kind of work that a manuscript needs to make it publication-ready is rarely the kind that writers are able to do themselves. They're too close to it, and so you probably are, too. To bring a manuscript to publishable form, you have to be ruthless from time to time, something that's remarkably hard to do when you're faced with tweaking or removing some lines/ paragraphs/ chapters that you really like. You look at them and remember old times, or how you struggled to find that perfect word. You're blinded to the words on the page; often, what you see is your intent rather than what's actually there.

Recently, after a meeting to discuss plot possibilities with a client, said client mentioned that he'd been working only with word order and grammar during his past few re-writes, and hadn't stopped to consider tweaking the plot itself, or the characters. It seemed to me (vain, puffed-up editor that I am) that he realized what I was really there to do for him: to be a set of eyes that don't just see what's good (I do that, too), but to find a way to merge his intentions for the manuscript with what he actually produced. Sometimes the two are fairly close, but sometimes they're worlds apart. And it takes an unbiased set of eyes to really evaluate that in a manuscript.

So, I'm not saying your mom lied to your face. She probably did think your manuscript was amazing, and I'm sure she's insanely proud that her offspring has written a manuscript. But it's her job to support and encourage you. An editor's job, however, is to critically evaluate the manuscript and work with you to make it even more amazing.