My books are flawed. That may not be a surprise to anyone that has read them, but I’m talking about technical flaws, not my minor failings at telling a story with compelling characters.
They have typos, and filter words, and the same words appear too close together. These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce these problems to a minimum.
Step one: Read it again. Read it to yourself. Read it aloud. Read it aloud to another person. Rip up or out the parts that don’t fit, even if you love them. Listen for words that don’t belong.
Step two: Scrub it for filter words that you may have missed, things like ‘I watched’, ‘I felt’, I heard’. Use the Find feature in Word or whatever app you’re using. Get rid of ‘very’ whenever possible. Not ‘very tired’, but ‘exhausted’.
Step three: Have more people read it. The more the better. They will find mistakes, inconsistencies, and logical lapses that you never noticed, but that you must fix.
Step four: Use the Spelling and Grammar check tool. Get rid of passive sentences and split infinitives.
Step five: Find an editor that hates you. Tough love feels like hate, so that’s what I’m going to call it when I’m on the receiving end. Examine the changes that are recommended critically. Don’t accept changes just because an editor made them, but listen closely to why he suggested them.
Step six: Now you think it’s perfect. It’s not. Use a text to speech application and have the machine read the book to you. MS Word has this built in. The voice is annoying and flat and it always mispronounces my character’s names, but it will read the exact words you have on the page. Hearing that ‘the secret has at last been reveled’ instead of revealed is eye opening.
Now that your book is perfect you are ready to move on to promoting and marketing it. When you have those two things figured out, let me know.
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