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How to Edit Your E-book in 10 Steps: The

Ultimate Checklist
Turgay Birand on July 23, 2018
Ashton in his book “How to Fly a Horse.” Your first dra needs to go on a long
journey through revision, editing, and proofreading before it’s ready to
become an e-book. But working with a professional editor can be expensive.

Freelance editors generally charge between $30 and $60 per hour, according to
the Editorial Freelancers Association. This means having your e-book edited
professionally can cost you thousands of dollars. If the cost of editing services
is prohibitive to you, you will need to edit your own e-book.

Even if self-editing cannot entirely replace working with a professional editor,

there are several tools you can use to bring your e-book closer to publication.
A self-editing checklist is one of them.

Before You Start Editing Your E-Book

(Source: Stock.adobe.com)

When your first dra is complete, put it aside for a few weeks. Letting some
possible when you start editing.

Some writers put their dra away for more than a year to be able to look at it
from the perspective of a reader. However, this might not be practical if you
need to meet a deadline. Whether it’s a few days or a few weeks, leave as much
time as possible between writing and editing.

10-Step Editing Checklist

(Source: Stock.adobe.com)

The editing checklist we developed has 10 steps — and many editing tips for
writers. But every book is unique, so you may want to adapt this checklist to fit
your needs.

Though editing fiction and editing nonfiction entail different things, you can
editing is the same: to ensure your e-book is effective in transmitting your
message to the reader.

1. Identify Major Flaws

Before you start editing your book for grammar or style, you need to fix any
major flaws that you might have missed during writing or revision. The errors
to look for include logical fallacies, repetitions of ideas, contradictions, and
missing information.

To identify these flaws, read the dra in one go if you can. During this first step,
you need to focus on the forest, not on the trees. So, try to resist the urge to
correct the spelling or punctuation mistakes you come across.

To spot the major errors in your dra , read it in a quiet place, away from
distractions. By finding and resolving any significant issues at this early stage
of editing, you’ll avoid rework and frustration later.

2. Check Your Facts

Whether your e-book is about finance, travel or wellness, presenting correct
information to the reader is essential if you write nonfiction. If you write
fiction, your story needs to be credible, and fact-checking helps you create a
realistic setting for your story.

Verify all things that can be verified — numbers, statistics, and names of
organizations, people, and places. Also, check that all web links work and
point to the right site.

If you’re new to nonfiction writing and fact-checking, Poynter’s News

University has a free course called “Hands-on Fact-Checking: A Short Course.”

3. Edit Your E-book for Grammar

grammatical mistakes in your dra , you need to know the rules and when it’s
OK to bend them. Subject-verb agreement errors, dangling participles,
misplaced modifiers, and parallel structure errors are some of the most
common mistakes writers make.

There’s no substitute for a good grammar book, but apps like Grammarly or
Hemingway help you identify errors you tend to miss. An e-book free from
grammatical mistakes proves you care about your writing.

4. Edit Your E-book for Spelling

While most readers will turn a blind eye to a few typos in your e-book, a
publication full of spelling mistakes will harm your credibility. Typos in a book
make people think that it contains not only sloppy spelling but also sloppy
research. Also, some typos can be offensive, so be very careful when you check
your e-book for spelling.

Once you’ve manually spell-checked your book, use a spell-checker to find and
correct any remaining typos. But don’t rely on spell-checkers, because no app
can find all the mistakes in your book.

5. Check the Punctuation

(Source: Stock.adobe.com)

Just like spelling and grammar, punctuation is an essential tool in your writer’s
toolbox. Use exclamation points, ellipses and dashes sparingly, and use italics
— not all caps — for emphasis.

Grammar checkers can detect some punctuation errors, but not all of them.
Mastering punctuation rules and correctly applying them is the only way to
make your text clear and easy to read.

Incorrect punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence, so punctuate

your sentences the right way to prevent confusion.

6. Edit Your E-Book for Style

An e-book with flawless punctuation, spelling, and grammar can still be very
hard to read if it has many stylistic errors. Some of the most common mistakes
that beginner nonfiction writers make include starting many sentences with
“there is” or “there are,” not noticing redundancies (such as “restored back” or
“see the finish line in sight”) and using biased language. Beginner fiction
writers o en use “she shouted,” “he whispered” and “they explained” instead
of “she said,” “he said,” and “they said” for speech attribution. They also dot
their writing with adverbs and adjectives.

All these and many other stylistic mistakes may not be easy to spot if you’re a
new writer, but books such as Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, as well as style
manuals, are valuable resources. Having an e-book free from stylistic flaws will
help ensure people enjoy reading it.

7. Improve Concision
As well as editing your book for style, to strengthen your writing you also need
your book. An online word frequency counter will show you how many times
certain words appear in a text.

If, for example, you discover that a particular phrase appears in 10 sentences in
the same chapter, consider rewriting some of those sentences. This doesn’t
mean you should eliminate all repetitions — repetition is a powerful literary
device — but try to find better alternatives for more powerful and concise
sentences.

8. Format Your E-Book

A dra full of formatting mistakes will not put you in the best light, no matter if
you self-publish your e-book or send it to an agent. If you plan to have a
proofreader work on your edited dra , you don’t need to worry about every
detail, but format your manuscript consistently.

Get rid of all those formatting mistakes that annoy editors and publishers.
Some of these mistakes include multiple spaces between sentences, misuse of
capitalization, overuse of italics and inconsistent paragraph spacing.

Format your text according to the publisher’s guidelines or use the industry
standard for manuscript format. The result will be a professional-looking dra
that is easy to read.

9. Is Your E-Book Complete?

Now that you’ve edited your e-book, verify that it is complete. Check that the
text, photos, tables, captions, footnotes, and other resources are all there. The
goal is to make sure you didn’t leave out anything during editing. Printing your
document as a PDF helps you get an idea about the final look of your e-book.

10. How Does It Sound?

This last step is the opposite of step 1 on our checklist: During step 10, you
Scientific American reports that, according to researchers, even when we read
silently, we “hear” the words in our head. This is why experienced editors say
good writing has good rhythm.

Read your book aloud to spot unintentional rhyming, tongue-twisters,

expressions that are hard to read, and words that are difficult to pronounce. If
you read on a screen, increase the font size, or zoom in if you work on a PDF, so
that you can focus on one sentence at a time. If you don’t want to — or are
unable to — read your e-book aloud, use an app that converts text to speech.

When you read something you wrote, you tend to see things you meant to
write, not what you actually wrote. In contrast, when you hear what you wrote,
it’s easier to spot any mistakes. By fixing any problems with the way your
writing sounds, you’ll ensure that the text is a pleasure both for the eye and for
the ear.

An Edited E-book Is One Step Closer to

Publication
From correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation to good style and rhythm, all
aspects of your writing work in concert to create a strong manuscript. Use our
checklist when you self-edit your e-book to make your job easier.

At EditionGuard, we know how much effort writing and editing an e-book

requires, and we want to help authors protect their work, which is why we
offer digital rights management (DRM) protection for e-books.
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