The last line of defense
What is proofreading?
At TypeRight, we only proofread documents that have already been professionally edited. Why is that? A proofread acts as a seal of approval by the editor, indicating that the book is ready to publish—and we believe that no book is ready to publish unless it has had at least two rounds of editing.
If your proofreader encounters multiple errors on every page, that’s a good indication that a more in-depth copy edit or line edit is appropriate. If you think your book is ready for a proofread and you haven’t worked with us before, send us a copy of your book for a free sample edit. We’ll look it over and let you know if we agree.
What will we be looking for?
On this final pass before publishing, we won’t be paying attention to sentence structure, readability, or flow. Here’s what we’ll be looking at:
Spelling
Grammar
Punctuation
Capitalization
Consistency
Syntax
Hyphenation
Number Formatting
Page Breaks
Headers/Footers
Page Numbering
It’s the minor details that count here: do you write the time as 2:00 p.m. or two o’clock? Are you consistent? Do you use numerals for numbers or do you spell them out?
When should you get a proofread?
Back in the day, books were proofread after typesetting, so the editor could catch any issues introduced in the process of formatting the manuscript. But these days, with everything digital, the text is imported directly into typesetting software, so there is little chance that errors will be introduced in the typesetting process. As a result, proofreading usually happens before typesetting.
Because this is the final editing pass, our best advice is this: pretend you’re not sending your novel in for proofreading—pretend you’re sending it in for publishing. Every word should be exactly the way you want it; that way, when your editor is finished proofreading, you’ll know the manuscript is ready for publishing.
How to review our changes
Very little needs to happen on your end after a proofread. We’ll let you know what we changed, and you can spot-check those locations, but otherwise you’re good to go.
What comes next?
Publishing! Printing! Book signings! Movie deals!
Hopefully.
The truth is that you’ve still got some work to do. Before you self-publish, you’ll need to have a book cover designed. And once the book is ready to print, you’ll be moving on to the promotion phase.
Free sample editing
Editing is a big investment, so you should always request a sample edit from potential editors. At TypeRight, we offer free sample edits of up to 1,000 words. By reviewing your free sample edit, you’ll know exactly what to expect from us when you send in your entire project.
