After spending months (maybe years) writing your non-fiction book, you're finally finished. Now it's time to find out if it's any good! So you let some close friends read it. And just as you expected, they love it.
The next step is to check it for typos or spelling mistakes, so you ask a colleague who's 'great at English' to read it. After marking up a few grammar or punctuation errors (which you promptly fix), they give you the thumbs up. Sweet!
So you self-publish the book on Amazon or your website, promote it through your channels and wait.
After a few nail-biting weeks, the reviews start trickling in. But it's not all rainbows and unicorns. One reviewer points out some errors. Another calls it a 'snoozefest'. Or worse. You get no reviews at all and your book sinks without a trace.
Ouch!
That's what can happen when you publish your book without using a professional editor.
The self-publishing conundrum
Look, I get it. Most authors can't spend four figures on pro design or editing. They just run the manuscript through an AI grammar checker, upload it as a PDF or EPUB and Bob's your uncle. But even though their self-published gem looks pro (to the untrained eye), horrors lurk within. Here are some of them:
wrong spellings (Grammarly won’t pick up ‘pubic access’ or ‘poo maintenance’)
confusing sentences (when the subject is so far away from the object that you need a compass to find it)
poor punctuation (remember Eats, Shoots and Leaves?)
poor formatting (confusing heading hierarchies or weird line spaces can make your book look amateurish)
repetition (unless you’re doing it for effect, it can look sloppy)
wordiness (it can make you sound stiff and formal)
factual errors (peanuts grow on trees – or do they?)
bias or legal issues (casual racism, outlandish claims or jokes that don't land could hurt you more than you realise).
Not only do these gaffes lose your audience, but they can also undermine your credibility. And that's the last thing you need when you're building know, like and trust with your audience.
I recently finished proofreading two publications that hadn't been copyedited before they were laid out. One was a children’s book on wind turbines. Another was a business plan.
When I saw the writing samples, my heart sank. There were issues that a simple proofread couldn’t fix.
You see, most people don’t know what’s wrong until someone tells them, which is what happened with the wind turbine book.
Sure, you can annotate PDF page proofs if the issues are minor (and they should be at this stage). But it’s a nightmare to mark up copious errors. Not only does it take hours, but the corrections can affect the design and layout.
In the end, you can only make minor corrections (which is what I had to do with the wind turbine book), which means that clunky sentences or poorly structured content can still slip through.
So what do you do?
It's simple. Send your Word file to a professional editor first. Any corrections can be accepted quickly. Then, and only then, should it go to a designer.
This means you need to include a copyedit in your schedule and build the fee into your budget. But it’s a far cry from publishing an ebook rife with errors. (And trust me, people will judge.) Or paying a proofreader to mark up errors using a format that isn’t designed for line editing. (Think 400 comments in a 100-page document. It’s enough to make your eyeballs melt in their sockets.)
And let’s not forget the poor sod (maybe you?) who has to take in those corrections manually, slotting in missing words, left-justifying text and moving around fiddly text boxes. Madness!
Summing up: What to avoid when self-publishing your book
So if you’ve got a publication in the works, do yourself a favour and book a copyeditor in advance. Not only will they weed out typos and improve the flow and logic of your writing, but they'll also save you a wee bit of embarrassment by highlighting factual errors or accidental bias.
And please, don’t give them the bum’s rush. Tight deadlines lead to rushed edits. Allow a few weeks to edit and review the manuscript.
Once the book is laid out, make sure you hire a proofreader to check the files for a final quality control. (To understand why you need both, see Copywriting vs. proofreading: What's the difference?) It could mean the difference between a book you're too ashamed to show anyone and one that build's authority and trust.
Have you ever jumped the gun and published something that wasn't ready? What was the response? Let me know in the comments. No judgements – I promise!
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