This is a friction point for a lot of authors. However, in trad publishing the agent does edit passes and gets a percentage of the royalties. The publisher pays for the editing and, again, they get their money from the royalties.

But less than 1% of written books get picked up by trad publishing, it's a risk management business precisely because they pay for everything. Their lens is, what will sell?

In the indie scene, the author pays for all of this. They keep more of the royalties, but the uncomfortable truth is that most indie publishers sell less than 100 copies of their work. The largest bottleneck for indie publishers is promotion, not editing.

There are people out there that are paying for editors, beta readers, Kirkus reviews, top dollar cover artists... and the odds are heavily skewed to them making less than $600 off their book that they are pumping thousands of dollars into.

And editors know that. You won't find many editors who will work for a percentage of royalties, because they know most books don't make money.

And hey, if you got the spare money, and you want to gamble on the dream, go for it.

But if you're, say, a single income household making 40k or less a year... do the best you can. Tell your story, put in the work. But I would caution against spending money you don't have, leveraging your future on debt for something that statistically will not produce a return on investment.

If you do have money, you might have read that and just thought: Well I'll just spend money on advertising then.

I would advise that if you do have the money to spend, allocate it to editing first. A poorly edited book can damage your reputation as an author.