Miles By Design

So the moment has finally arrived! You have finished your book! All that time and energy has finally paid off and you have a finished product in front of you.

Now my advice to you here would be to give yourself at least a two day rest. Relish the fact that the major brunt of the work is over. However that manuscript of yours is most likely not ready for the eyes of the general public just yet.

Now you have entered the wondrous domain of proofreading! (Not)

My structure for proofreading was that I read it through first and then got someone that I knew who was savvy with literature to have a read through after.

However if you do not know anyone that you can trust enough with your 'baby' then there are plenty of proofreading companies out there that will provide the same service for a fee.

Proofreading is essential. No matter how much we all want to believe we got it right the first time, I found most of my own mistakes in my original draft of Heroes of Terisca on my own read through. Reading it back to myself even I had moments of thinking “What the heck was I trying to say here?”

By getting someone else to read it through with a fresh pair of eyes not only helps eliminate problems with the technical aspects of writing but also aids you to amend any prose that they find troublesome to comprehend.

Look at proofreading as sort of like a focus group, getting you ready for what your potential customers might also feel when they read it.

Remember nothing is more annoying that when you are reading a book and you find a grammatical error or a spelling mistake and it totally brings you out of the book while you try and work out what should have been there instead.

I am not saying that everything is going to get caught in the net of proofreading but if you can stop as many of the blunders as possible then it’s all for the greater good.

Even after I had uploaded my original file to Amazon I ended up resubmitting it a few months later when I discovered a sentence that I still was not satisfied with.