You’re that totally prepared author, you know, the one who’s done at least 3 Drafts of your book: self-edited, peer-edited, beta-edited and professional edited to the point where you’ve just received the final print proof for your book and you’re ready to hit publish… but should you?

You don’t really need to read through that proof copy yet again? After all, you’ve been staring at the same words for 3+ drafts and you know that everything is as it should be.

Not necessarily…

Maybe you have an orphan or widow that wasn’t caught. If you’ve gone to all the trouble of getting your book formatted for print, you’ll want to make sure it looks just as professional as the, well, professionals.

Maybe your spell-check allows American English to slip in to your vocabulary even though you have your word processing program set to British English and neighbor has slipped in or counselor is missing it’s second ‘L’ in every instance of the word.

Perhaps someone hit the wrong key during one of the drafts and the word “explained” is actually spelled “esplained” by accident, even thought it wasn’t written that way initially.

Or what about those “floating  ” quotes. You know, where you’ve ended dialogue with an em-dash –” and then the closing quotes have been kicked to the next line all by themselves…

These things and more do happen!

So don’t take for granted that just because this is your “final proof” you don’t need to pay close attention to how your book looks.

Pause before you hit that “publish” button and give your hard-earned, well-worked story the final once-over it deserves 😉

Happy Editing!

Professional Editing for 1st time clients from $3.50/300 words for a “full edit” ~ query M.J. HERE.

Categories: Editing

Tags: book formatting, drafting, eBooks, editing advice, editing help, editing tip, errors, final proof, formatting, M.J. Moores, print, self-editing