[vladmihalcea]

I was approached by two "real" publishers asking me whether I want to publish my book with them.

I had declined both of them as they only offered 10% royalty rates.

I didn't have to pay for editing. I did everything myself: writing, diagrams, proofreading, marketing.

In fact, I decided to self-publish it after reading this article from Antonio Goncalves about his Java EE 7 book:

https://antoniogoncalves.org/2014/09/16/the-uncensored-java-...

[ghaff]

Everyone should obviously do things as they individually see fit. But, in my experience, publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. All I know is that I find it hard to even publish a blog post without typos if someone else doesn't edit it--and sometimes even then.

(The good news is that it's not really expensive to pay someone to do if you don't really need the services of a full-blown editor who is advising on structure, flow, etc.)

[munificent]

> publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general.

Agreed, but it's easy to hire a freelance copy editor. In fact, that's often what traditional publishers do too.

[ghaff]

Yep. The one time I really wanted one, I just paid an intern working for a magazine editor friend of mine a few hundred dollars and that was fine.

IMO, it's not something you can rely on software for although software catches a lot of course. The one time I didn't do it worked out OK. But I had a co-author and we had sufficiently reworked the (somewhat shorter) book enough times over a fairly long period that I decided it had had enough fresh eyes on it to stand on its own.

And of course publishers aren't perfect either. I've found a few typos in my last book which did go through a traditional publisher even though I also proofread it pretty carefully. (One mistake was in front matter which I added fairly late on which makes me suspect there would have been a lot more errors in the book if I didn't check it carefully myself.)

[vladmihalcea]

I'm using Grammarly to correct my spelling mistakes. It also provides tips about phrasing.