Being an author means you need to master the art of storytelling and conveying imaginative stories to make them sound believable to the world. Writing a book is a dream not many people can achieve but if you have passed that stage, you have crossed a milestone.
But, if you choose to take your story ahead and show it to the world, you need to perfect it and amend the Eros you made throughout the ghostwriting process. Learning to edit your book is another skill you need to know as an author because it will help make your book shine and convey the purported message as it is.
Why editing your book is important
Book editing is one of the most important, but often overlooked, steps in writing a book. It’s easy to think that as long as your grammar and spelling are correct, you don’t need an editor. Editing your own work can be tiring, but it will help improve your editing skills and see where you went wrong.
Editing your book carries enormous benefits. When you choose to edit your work, it can help you in the following ways:
- Help you clarify your message
- Eliminate distractions
- Improve your writing style
- Ensure consistency
- Spot errors
5 Ways to Edit Your Book
-
Step away from your book for a while
Leave your work alone for at least a week before you read it again, and be sure to give yourself an emotional break too. Distance yourself from the story, and let your subconscious chew on all the words you’ve written. You’ll have fresh eyes when you come back later.
This will help you build a new perspective and make you think a bit objectively which help you spot errors that you couldn’t a week before.
-
Read aloud or let someone else do it
This will help you see any repetitions of words or phrases that might be fine in speech but would sound awkward in print. Some writing style guides may point out other issues with repetition: for instance, if you use the same word too often, it will start to feel stale and lose its impact. When you spot overused or irrelevant words by reading aloud, you’ll know how to add those that will make your text sound powerful and worthy to be read.
-
Make your friends or family read your work
A good way to edit your own book is to share it with someone who knows you really well, so they can tell you what they really think. If you’re lucky, your writing group or critique partner will be able to point out things you don’t see because you wrote it. That’s the ideal situation, but if you don’t have a group or partner, there are other ways to get feedback on your work.
1Your friends or family can be your beta readers who can proofread your work at best but not more than that. There would still be substantial editing left such as developmental and copyediting which are probably more important than beta reading but something is better than nothing especially when you can’t afford to hire professional book editing services.
-
Use beta reading tools
Editing your own work can be a daunting task. Some people, however, are not aware that editing tools exist that can both help and even take the place of a human editor. There’s a wide variety of editing tools available, so here’s some to get you started:
Here are some editing tools that can help you with beta reading your work:
- Word Count Tool
- Readability Test Tool
- Grammarly for Spelling and Basic Editing
- Hemingway App for Editing and Proofreading
- Grammarly Premium for Advanced Editing
-
Hire professional book editing services
The best way to edit your own book well is to hire professional book editing services to do it for you. A good editor will catch more mistakes than you can on your own because they know what to look for and will spot things that you may miss. But hiring an editor isn’t cheap and the cost adds up quickly if you have multiple books or have a lot of content (like if you are publishing eBooks). You can also hire people in places like Fiverr to do it for cheap but the quality will likely reflect this cheap price tag. To edit a 300-page book, expect to pay at least $100-$200.
That was all about editing your book and finding help when you can’t handle the job yourself. Remember that it’s good to learn the skill of editing because it can not only help you in editing your work but it will be even greater if you get to polish this skill when editing someone else’s work.
This will give you an edge and you can also earn by being a copyeditor. But when it comes to your own work, it’s better to have an objective viewpoint to avoid bias and misjudgment to make sure your book is edited perfectly.