How to Prepare Your Book for Editing – Before You Start

In this blog post, we will be looking at some things that you can do to get your book ready for editing before you send it off for a professional edit. Of course, you don’t want to rely on just your own editing and skip having an editor altogether, just get things started off so your book is on the right track. We will start by asking what the point of preparing your book is and how it can benefit you, then move on to look at some of the possible methods to prepare your book.

Why Prepare Your Book?

First of all, why bother at all with preparing your book if you are getting a professional edit? One reason is that it should save you money when you are paying for editing. This will depend on the payment system that your chosen editor uses, but you may have to pay less if your book is better prepared for publication. If your editor is paid on an hourly basis, you would expect it to take less time than the raw version of your book, so the final price would be lower.

On the other hand, some editors charge by the word count, which would stay roughly the same even after some preparation. However, they may offer tiered levels of editing based on a sample of your book, so you could be charged a lower rate in this way.

Another advantage of preparing your book is that you might notice some things that you would otherwise have missed. Not necessarily incorrect things, as your editor should pick up on these, but just parts that you would like to change. Picking up on these should improve your book and give you more chances to review your writing. You will almost certainly want to read through your book a few times anyway, so it makes sense to get it ready for editing. In some ways, it can even save you time, as one of the best ways to prepare it for editing is to just stick to simple fonts and formatting.

How to Prepare Your Book

One way to start preparing your book is to do a self-edit. This means that you go through the book yourself, correcting as much as you can. This can be as simple as running a spelling and grammar check in your word processor, as this is a quick way to catch a lot of errors. Remember that these are not always correct, so do check its suggestions before you accept them! You can also check for any repeated words or phrases. One of the easiest ways to do this is to have text-to-speech software read your writing out to you, as it will not automatically skip repeated words as a human might. This allows you to notice and correct these errors.

When doing a self-edit, it is also a good idea to check the structure of your book. You can do this by listing all of the chapters, a brief summary of what happened in them and what new information the reader should have learnt. This can then help to highlight any plot holes that may be there, such as an event happening without the reader knowing a crucial bit of information leading up to it. On the other hand, examining your chapters like this can also show if you have repeated yourself, for example, having three similar explanations in the same chapter. This is true to a lesser degree across chapters, as a brief reminder might be necessary, but you don’t want to repeat too much information.

Another way you can prepare your book is to create a style sheet for it. This lists words or phrases that are unique to your book, for example, if you are writing a science fiction book, you will likely have a lot of unique words for names, places, and so on. Even if you have a book with fewer unique words, you will still need a way to keep track of names and your preferences for hyphenation and lists. A style sheet puts all of these together so that you (and your editor) can check that they are consistent.

It will also help if you set clear goals for your editor. What level of editing are you expecting? Are you looking for a developmental edit or copyediting? By describing to your editor what you want to be done, they will know what type of editing you need, which avoids you having a nasty surprise later if they do the wrong sort.

Finally, make sure you send your book as a single file, not as individual chapters. Editors will be looking for consistency and there are various software tools they can use to help with this. However, these rely on everything being in the same document, so they will have to start by combining them all if you haven’t already done so.

Wrapping Up

Getting everything ready for your editor will also help you to have a better understanding of your book. For example, it is often worth creating a style sheet for your own reference, if nothing else. Whatever you decide to do, good luck with your book!

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