editing process

Reader AL asks about my editing process.

It’s basically two stages.

The first stage is I go through the book one chapter at a time and make changes and corrections. I use Microsoft Office’s Track Changes feature for this. Then once I’ve reached the end of the chapter, I use the Review Changes feature to double-check any changes I’ve made, and then I give it a passover with the Grammarly Word pluging. After that, I move the finished chapter into the ebook file.

(This, incidentally, is why I still use Microsoft Word. I’ve been really annoyed at some of the changes in Word lately, but the Track Changes feature in LibreOffice Writer isn’t nearly as good. I might start writing rough drafts in LibreOffice, though.)

Once all the chapters have been edited, I go on to the second stage. I convert the book to a MOBI file, put it on my Kindle Fire, and then use the Fire’s text-to-speech feature to read the book aloud to myself. A few people have commented that in the last two years my books have fewer typos than previously, and that’s because I started using the Fire for the read-aloud. This seems to work really well for finding most of the typos and sentences that don’t make sense. The second stage, I admit, is boring and quite tedious, but it works well for improving the book. I can typically get a 100k book through Stage Two in about three days, sometimes four.

The entire process usually takes a couple of weeks or so.

-JM