One of the biggest mistakes a new author can make is to publish a book they’ve edited themselves. Sounds harsh, but it’s true. It’s essential to hire an editor for your book so that you end up with a book that gets the results you want.
Your Reputation Is at Stake
If there are spelling, grammar, and formatting mistakes in your book you can bet that at least a dozen people will publicly call you out! They’ll write about the problems they found in writing a review of your book, and if there are too many errors, they’ll tell other people not to bother buying it. If you’re lucky, they’ll reach out to you and tell you about the mistakes they found, allowing you to correct them.
But those aren’t even the people that you should worry about the most. What should worry you the most, are the people that don’t say anything at all. The people who would have needed the information in your book the most – your potential customers and readers, will doubt the validity of your information, professionalism, and expertise.
While simple spelling and grammar errors may not seem like much, these mistakes hurt your credibility. If you’re going to sell books, you want your readers to trust the information that you’re sharing. You want them to turn to you for more information and additional resources, programs, and services.
You’ll Lose More Than the Sales
Another thing that can happen when your readers find errors is that they’ll return the book. Buyers of digital, audio, and print books can return them, and they do. And digital book readers are particularly finicky. They expect digital books to be top quality. If your book isn’t of the best quality, they’ll decide that neither are your products or services, and you’ll lose potential clients and customers, without ever getting another chance.
So, If You Can’t Edit It Yourself, What are Your Choices?
You might be wondering why you can’t edit it yourself – why I’m saying that you can’t trust your eyes to be good enough to find the mistakes.
The truth is that you know your material so well that you’re just going to miss most mistakes. Having a reader with fresh eyes (and someone that is a professional editor and knows what to look for and how to make it better), is the best approach. And it’s the step I highly recommend you take.
Start with a Good Spelling and Grammar Checker
One way you can edit your book is to use a good grammar and spelling checker. My personal choice is “Grammarly”. It’s free, although they have a very inexpensive premium one, and it includes other features, like checking for clarity and writing style. Autocrit offers different – and deeper – types of services. It can go through your manuscript and give you many different reports about what you are doing wrong and give you ideas to fix problems. I believe it’s more aligned toward fiction books, although it does have sections for non-fiction.
Grammerly tells you how many errors it found in your writing, so, when you’ve finished a writing session, you can run it, to fix the errors. Then, at the end of writing your book, run it again.
You can find several professional editors available online. However, don’t just take their word for it that they’re a great editor. Check references, ask other authors for recommendations, and check into their experience. You don’t want to hire an editor, trust in their abilities, publish your book and then find out that they missed key mistakes.
Using Beta Readers
After editing and before you launch it, ask a few trusted people to read your book. These readers are called beta readers. They can read your book not only for content but also for errors and clarity. Beta readers can also be the first folks to leave reviews once you publish your book.
Editing your book is the last step to take before you publish. You put so much time, energy, and money into creating your book, so your book should represent you in the way you want to be represented. That’s why I recommend you hire an editor as the last step.