I used to be a copy editor and I would never rely 100% on self-editing
After doing painting and building maintenance all through high school, my first real job was as an intern at Texas A&M University Press. I helped build indexes and did proofreading. My finest moment was doing the last pass on Galveston and the Great West and catching an “exits” that was supposed to be “exist.” When my internship was over, they gave me a copy of the book of my choice and I chose that one, which I still have.
I went on to be copy chief at a financial magazine, a managing editor at Condé Nast, and an assistant news editor at Dow Jones. But despite all of that experience editing other people’s work, and as good as I am at catching my own errors, I’ve never relied completely on self-editing.
For each of my five nonfiction books, I hired a professional copyeditor. And for the first novel in my dystopian sci-fi trilogy, I hired a professional copyeditor, too.
Simply put, it’s very, very difficult to catch your own errors. Because you know what the copy is supposed to say, your mind will sometimes fill in missing words, correct incorrect verb tenses, and otherwise trick you into thinking that sentence you just read is fine.
In Good Writing, Neil Allen says, “Editors don’t improve me; they fill in my blind spots.” While he’s speaking more about developmental editors, the same is true of copyeditors and proofreaders. You need fresh eyes to catch your mistakes, and no matter what tips and tricks you use, yours will never be as fresh as someone else’s.
Self-editing tricks
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t self-edit. You should, because the more mistakes and awkward phrasings you can weed out, the better off your manuscript will be when you hand it off.
Two of the self-editing tricks I’ve found to work best are to:
- Read your book aloud. It slows you down and engages your sense of hearing, not just sight. It can also give you a much better sense of the cadence and rhythm of your prose, and where you might want to speed things up or slow them down.
- Print your book. Going from screen to paper is a change of form that makes the copy seem fresh and new to your brain.
Those help, but obviously aren’t foolproof. Sadly, even with a professional copyeditor, a few mistakes are likely to slip through. That was the case with three of my five nonfiction books. Thankfully, one of the great things about self-publishing is that your book can be updated.
Is error-free realistic?
But even with fixing the small mistakes I’ve heard about, I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a lingering minor mistake somewhere in each of my books. Readers will forgive that. What they won’t forgive is mistake after mistake after mistake.
In a novel I was reading recently, I encountered four errors—a missing period, a wrong name, an incorrect verb tense—in the first 150 pages. I put it down and began reading another book. That’s what hiring a copyeditor is intended to prevent.
Related posts:
The mistakes my copy editor caught
How many of my manuscript’s 600+ em dashes did my copy editor cut?
My sci-fi novel is now in the hands of my copy editor
Good Writing: An Evening with Anne Lamott & Neal Allen
Why I self-published my nonfiction books
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