WHY COPY EDITS MATTER

They ain’t sexy, and they ain’t glamorous, but spelling and grammar matter.

A few days ago, I was getting ready to put up my first self-published book on Amazon, and a spell checker during the conversion of the file to mobi inserted the mother of all typo’s into my story. The original line reads that the hero and heroine are going to eat poolside, and it auto-corrected to “eat poopsite.” Took me two days to figure out how to fix that freaking typo! But there was NO WAY I was publishing the book with that glaring of an error in it.

Getting the spelling and grammar right shows a reader that you care about your work. It marks you as a professional. A “real” writer, as it were.

The idea is to convey that, if quality of technique is high on your radar, maybe high quality of story will be, too. Also, you want the reader to lose themselves in the story, not get hung up on the words or punctuation marks on the page.

The best way to ensure that your manuscript is free of typos and grammar errors is to get several different readers to proofread your story. I work with some of the best editors in the business, and even they miss errors from time to time.

And you, the writer? You’re going to miss catching more mistakes than you can believe. The problem is you’re too familiar with the story and too familiar with what you thought you said/typed. You won’t see what’s actually on the page.

Every story, and I mean EVERY story, needs an impartial outsider to copy edit it. NOTE: copy editing is a fancy word for proofreading. A copy editor will also point out word repetitions and verify dates, facts, and technical details, but the copy editor’s main job is to get the commas right and catch the typos.

If you can’t afford to pay a professional copy editor, find a friend–or better, several friends– who are REALLY good with spelling and grammar, and barter, beg, or bully them into going through your manuscript as carefully as they can.

One reason traditionally published books tend to be very clean is because many people see the manuscript before it’s published. There are multiple opportunities for errors to be spotted and corrected. If you’re self-publishing, you need to mimic this part of the process as closely as possible. Get lots of eyes on the manuscript before it’s finalized.

The fastest way to pull a reader out of the story is to have them stumble over a glaring error in the writing itself. Getting the spelling and grammar right matters. A lot.