What Should You Do If You’re Editing Your Non-Fiction Book Yourself?

Proofread the Edited Draft of Your eBook After your editor is done editing, make sure that you read through the entire book. Pay attention to grammar and sentence structure; don’t focus on the content of the book. Finalize your content and the structure of your book before you finish writing it. You will keep finding things to change if you look at the content after you are done writing. This will make it harder to finish your book and move onto the next. Proofread the edited version of your eBook. Make whatever changes you can as you read through it. Try not to be too nitpicky when you’re proofreading. As mentioned earlier, you will struggle to finish your book if you try hard to improve every bit of it. Talk to your editor if there are still a lot of grammatical errors in your eBook. Have them make the necessary changes and send you a revised draft at the earliest. You are paying your editor for their service, so don’t accept sloppy work. Keep asking them to make revisions until the draft is the best it can be. You are in charge, so you should always get your money’s worth.

What Should You Do If You’re Editing Your Non-Fiction Book Yourself?

Though we don’t recommend it, you can always consider editing your eBook yourself. By writing and editing your work yourself, you may overlook some errors. This is because it can be difficult to recognize your mistakes. You can prevent this by editing a book that you didn’t write. By that, we mean that you hire a ghostwriter to write the entire eBook, and then you edit it once he is done. This way, the final word on that book will be yours. Here’s a short guide on what you should do when editing your non-fiction book. These tasks are important for all forms of writing, but our goal is to discuss how it specifically helps with editing non-fiction writing.

Rest for a FewDays The last thing that you should do when editing your book yourself is edit as soon as you finish writing. You must give yourself at least a few days of rest from your book. We recommend you take a week off. In that week off, try not to think about your book. Focus on other things in your life. This will allow you to come back to your book with a fresh mind. It is important to read your book like you’re doing it for the first time. This way, you will be able to pick up on mistakes that you overlooked the first time you were writing and reading it. Also, if you start editing as soon as you finish writing, you

will still be in the same headspace. This will make it challenging to think about your work from a fresh perspective.

StartWith the Large Mistakes Your editing process should always start from the larger picture and then narrow down to the finer details. Therefore, the first thing you should look at is the structure of your book, and the last thing you should look at is each sentence. Go over the structure of your book by looking at each section of your book. Each section should flow well into the next and should cover every major detail.

Move on to ChapterTitles The next thing you need to look at is the titles of the chapters. Is there good consistency among the other chapters? The titles don’t have to be very similar, but they should have the same style. For example, if you are writing an instructional guide for your eBook, you can make all of the chapter titles like blog titles. This means that you address the reader, you add questions, or you make a list of things the reader should do. There is no particular set of rules that you have to follow, but you must try to bring some consistency in your chapter titles. You must also check and see if each chapter title flows well into the next (within each section). At this point, your goal is to check for the structure of each section. Therefore, the chapters within it should come together to make one coherent point. Do you feel like you are getting a sense of that from the titles of the chapters only? If not, then tweak the titles of the chapters so that they make the point in each section somewhat clear.

Check the Consistency of the Subheadings The next step is to start reading the book. Take one chapter at a time and fix everything in one go before you move on to the next. Start with reading the titles of the subheadings. Do the same thing you did with the titles for the chapters. Each subheading should be consistent with each other and with the title of the chapter.

For example, if the title of a chapter is “What You Should Do to Lose Weight,” a good subheading would be “exercise every day for 40 minutes”. This subheading is good because it is consistent with the title of the chapter. The title of the chapter is telling the reader what they should do to lose weight, which means that your subheading should provide certain actions that readers can do to achieve this. An

example of a bad subheading for this chapter title is “healthy diet.” This subheading is bad because it is not phrased as an action. It doesn’t tell the reader what to do. This disrupts the flow of the chapter, and you must be careful to avoid it.

Analyze the Structure of Each Paragraph Your next step is to go through each paragraph. Read each paragraph once and evaluate whether the point within it is clear. Does each sentence help in making that point clear? Is there more than one point in one paragraph? If there is, can the paragraph be split into two separate paragraphs? Is the paragraph too long? Will it serve the reader’s flow to split a long paragraph into two shorter paragraphs? Does one sentence flow well into the other? Keep these questions in mind when you’re editing each paragraph. That said, try not to get too obsessive about these details. You will spend far too much time on the editing process, and you may feel like giving up. Read through the paragraphs quickly with these questions in mind and move to the sentences.

Move on to EachSentence Once you are done with evaluating the structure of a paragraph, you should move on to the sentences. The first thing you should do is remove any sentence that seems extraneous. Don’t add fluff in your book. Fluff will make your readers feel like they are reading in circles, which will ruin their engagement with the text. The next thing you need to do is to pay attention to the structure of each sentence. Every sentence should make sense and read in a flow. Make sure to shorten sentences that are too long. For non-fiction, it’s best to write in short sentences that are easy to read. This will allow the reader to get through the material quicker. Try to leave creative sentences for fiction writing. The last thing you should do is pay attention to the grammar of the sentences. Here are some things that you should look out for:

Punctuation Pay attention to the punctuation marks in the text. Each of the existing punctuation marks in the text should be used appropriately. You also may find that you haven’t added a punctuation mark in the text. Thus, make sure to keep your eyes open for that as well. If you are unsure about which punctuation mark to use, do a quick search and find out. Don’t leave anything to chance.

Passive Voice A sentence is said to have a passive voice when an action happens to a subject as opposed to the subject acting. For example, a sentence with a passive voice is: “he

was shot by the policeman,” whereas a sentence with an active voice is: “the policeman shot him.” Now, the passive voice is not grammatically incorrect. However, it is not a pleasant way of writing. That is why you must write in the passive voice sparingly or not at all. Sentences with active voice read better and will make your work more engaging as a result. For non-fiction writing, it is best to keep the passive voice to zero if possible.

Incorrect Words Look out for words that aren’t the most appropriate for a particular sentence. You should be aware of the denotations and connotations of the words you are using. Some words may have the same denotation, i.e., the literal meaning in the dictionary, but a different connotation, i.e., an additional meaning than the literal meaning. Therefore, if you are using a synonym for one word, make sure that the connotations of both those words are the same. If you use a word with a different connotation, the whole sentence will have a different meaning, and your reader will be confused about what you are trying to say.

Crutch Words or Phrases Crutch words are those few words or phrases that you often use in your writing. You may not realize that you use these words often until you stop and count the number of times you have used it in a piece of text. You will notice that a lot of your crutch words are at the start or end of a sentence.

Read through your text and keep an eye out for words or phrases that you have used repeatedly. Make a note of those words in another document. Try to roughly count how many times you have used those words in a few pages of your text. The purpose of counting your crutch words is to know how many times you are approximately using a particular crutch word. Sometimes it may seem like you are not using one crutch word a lot, even though you are. It can be the opposite of that too.

Narrow down some of the most frequently-used crutch words and search for them in your text. Remove these crutch words in some cases and replace them with an appropriate synonym. If a sentence still makes sense after you remove the crutch word, leave it that way. Don’t overcomplicate your sentences with unnecessary words or phrases.