You’ve written your book and you are ready to send it to your editor but, before you hit the Send button, do take another look at your manuscript. As far as your editor is concerned, detail is all-important and it’s the small things that matter so follow these 7 tips to keep your editor happy:

Format Your Manuscript

Make sure it is properly paragraphed and the spacing is consistent throughout the entire manuscript. Your publisher may provide guidelines to work to but, if not, make your own decision and stick to it. Where you use indents, use the correct Indent tab in your editing program – don’t use spaces or manual tabs.

Spellcheck your Manuscript

Built-in spellcheckers are not the most perfect tools on the planet but they do catch the obvious errors. While you are using the spellchecker, scan through it yourself and see if you can pick up any others. The last thing your editor wants to be doing is ‘marking’ your manuscript for spelling errors; they should be spending their time worrying about whether your manuscript is readable or finding timeline conflicts.

Double-Check Your Names

Only you know if you changed the name of a character or a place in your manuscript. Can’t remember if you changed all instances? Open the Find facility in your typing program and type in the old name – if there are any left, they will be found and you can change them all using the Replace facility. This saves your editor having to keep questioning you about whether a name should be changed and it saves an awful lot of confusion in the long run.

Gen up on Dialog Attributions and Use Them

Whether you are writing creative non-fiction or fiction, you will always be playing about with dialog. Dialog attributions include things like “he said” and “she said” and they must be included in the sentence, not separately. For example a sentence like “I saw her walking down the street”. He said (with he said as the attribution) should read like “I saw her walking down the street”, he said.

Check Words for Overuse

Some words are used too much in books, like “very”, “really”, and “that”. Often, we don’t notice that we keep using them so re-read your sentences without the extra words; if it reads fine then ditch the word.

Break Your Sentences Up

Do vary sentences – you don’t need to fit an entire description into one sentence, using loads of ‘ands’ to string it together. Chop them up where needed. Use sentence length to create moods, such as short sentences for tension, or to catch the attention of the reader. Longer sentence help where the flow is needed so use both kinds to keep your reader hooked and your editor from pulling her hair out.

Keep on Improving

If your manuscript comes back with the same type of errors marked, you know you need to do something about it. Take writing courses, read books and articles about writing, go to writing seminars. Do anything that helps you to improve your writing so you don’t keep making the same mistakes that you made at the start.