SELF PUBLISHING - PREPARING YOUR MANUSCRIPT - PART FOUR

YOUR FINAL DRAFT - HOW CAREFULLY HAVE YOU CHECKED IT?

It's easy to overlook repetitions, omissions, name changes and other clangers in your eagerness to get your book out there. These are the concern of an editor - and if you're self publishing, you may well be your own editor - so here are a few pointers:

TIME SCALE: Check back and see if you've allowed enough time for all the events to take place. For instance, one of my children's novels was set during the school summer holiday. You might find you need to extend the holiday into October, or even November, for the story to reach its conclusion.

CHANGING THE NAMES OF CHARACTERS: It can happen to the most experienced of writers. For whatever reason, you decide part way through your story to change someone's name - quite often because you've got to know your character intimately and realise the name just doesn't suit him/her. It's more than likely that you'll miss one or two as you comb through manually. By all means do this, but also use FIND & REPLACE to ensure none have slipped through unchanged. Using Tom changing to Meredith as an example, select Tom, Tom's, TOM, "Tom" and any others you can think of.

TYING UP LOOSE ENDS: Have you left any of your minor characters in suspense? If a burglar tied up the Jones's cleaning lady and dumped her in a cupboard during Chapter 2, is she still there, abandoned and suffering agonising cramp?

PUNCTUATION, SPACING, ETC, ETC:  I'm almost ashamed to print this review (see below), but it was my very first book to be self-published (in 2015), and I've learned a lot since. The book (THE MYSTERY OF CRAVEN MANOR) is now a best seller and gains mostly 5 star reviews.

 I know it's tedious, but it really is important to proof-read your book at least three times before you submit it for publication. (For the final check, toggle Formatting Marks to catch all the above print errors). I have now made corrections - actually, 11 of them in a total of 170 pages, but enough to irritate one reader sufficiently to put a negative review on Amazon.

Where is the proof reading?!?!

Very good book with an engaging plot. My 9 year old really enjoyed it and so did I. 
HOWEVER, it is riddled with typos and ridiculous errors such as speech marks inverted, upside down apostrophes 

and double full stops! These occur so frequently that it seriously detracts from the story itself.

Might have been wise to have someone proof read the book before it was published!