Have you ever noticed typos in an e-book?
Maybe it’s not a big deal, but I’ve been reading reviews on Amazon lately and have found reviews where readers enjoyed the story but won’t buy another book by the author because of typos, grammatical errors, or bad formatting. That can’t be good.
If you’ve published electronically, you don’t want this to happen to you. But how do you avoid it?
After you’ve proofread, and proofread and proofread again, then had your novel proofread by someone other than yourself, there is another task you can perform to ensure high quality work.
I use Scrivener to write and recently found the feature that exports a manuscript into e-book formatting. I tried this and then sent my novel to my Kindle. I used to just send a word document to my Kindle and read my novel that way, but how could I know if the formatting was off?
Now with this feature, my novel is formatted as a reader would see it on their electronic device. Scrivener will export to epub (.epub), Kindle ebook (.mobi) or iBooks Author Chapters (.docx). I’m sure there are other writing programs that have the same function.
It’s interesting reading my novel for the first time in this format. I caught several errors in formatting; such as, no space after one scene and before the next. This might seem like an inconsequential error, but what if I’d confused a reader by not indicating when one scene ended and a new scene started?
As an added bonus, reading on the kindle makes my novel seem real.
Do you have ways to check your novel for formatting errors or typos?
See Proofreading/Copyediting if you’re interested in my in-depth process.
Thanks for reading . . .
Creative Story Editors 
I have had a professional editor proof read my book. As you say , a fresh pair of eyes helps. We have plenty of conversation in my book so I speak in slang terms sometimes. I also use commas and ….. to simulate a pause in my conversations. My first published book is about 4500 words. Much shorter then a novel. My other 4 books are a bit shorter. We hope to have book 2 published next year. My dog sister Angel is on Chemo this year so we had to wait on getting the illustrations done. Family comes first. Love M.J.
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Family does come first. I hope all goes well for Angel. You’re lucky to have a professional editor. I’ve have 2 of my novels read by editors and received high level comments, which were immensely helpful. In the end, I think it’s the author’s responsibility to produce a manuscript that is as error free as possible. Then the hard work of taking in someone else’s critique comes into play.
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I tried to write it as Momma Jean was taught in English classes but The editor didn’t want paragraphs indented and everytime a new dog spoke I had to start a new double spaced line., triple space for new paragraphs but nothing indented. I assume that was to leave room for their corrections.
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Very interesting. I guess when you are a famous doggy author, you have to work with editors and listen to publishers. All in a dog’s work.
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I use Scrivener, too. What a cool feature!
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I hope the feature helps you 🙂
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I love that feature and I too really enjoyed reading it on my kindle. It made it feel like a real book and I caught a lot of formatting that way.
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Totally agree, Kate. Thanks for commenting.
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