Why You Need a Well-Edited Book Manuscript
Why You Need a Well-Edited Book Manuscript
Whether you are going to open the door to self-publishing or traditional publishing with your ready manuscript in hand, you better have a well-edited manuscript that can put you on the success path.
Please accept my congratulations that you have completed your book manuscript to your satisfaction. All the months, weeks, days and hours that you poured over your manuscript, refining the words and defining the chapters have finally resulted in a collection of pages that you call a good manuscript.
This is a big achievement in itself and you deserve credit for it. Now just one more thing. Has someone also edited your manuscript?
No? Oh. That’s a bit of a roadblock. Since nobody has edited your nice manuscript and it is only your eyes that have seen all those typed pages, I feel obliged to tell you that your manuscript is not ready to publish.
Yes. I can repeat it. If your manuscript has not been edited by someone after all the revisions that you have done to the best of your ability, I have to advise you something. Do not self-publish or send your manuscript to a publisher for approval just yet.
Some book editor needs to see your manuscript and suggest corrections and improvements to it. After this has been done, you need to have implemented all those corrections in your manuscript. Now your manuscript is ready for the reader - if you are self-publishing, or ready for the traditional publishing house editor to try to read it, reject it or approve it.
In simple words, a well-edited manuscript gives you a far better chance of gaining readers when you self-publish, or the approval of a publishing house book editor if they decide to publish your manuscript.
Edited Manuscript Benefits
1. Clear Message
As a book author, what you want as priority is someone to read the book from cover to cover. This would be an ideal scenario. To catch the attention of such a reader, your manuscript needs to be on point. Whatever message you have attempted to highlight in your manuscript needs to be crystal clear.
Such clarity engages the attention of your reader to the manuscript. A book editor helps in distilling that message with a clear focus on having the right chapters, proper paragraphs, correct sentences and efficient choice of words. You may have done your best as an author, keeping all errors to the minimum, but a second pair of experienced eyes can do wonders to your manuscript.
An edited manuscript brings out a clear message and story.
2. Less Confusion
As an author, what you have written is clear to you. There is no doubt in your mind that what you wanted to say, whether it is a story or narrative non-fiction, you did it well. But then what can happen next is that if you go ahead and publish it without anyone else looking at your manuscript, then you may face the proverbial music later on.
Meaning? If you market your book well, readers get interested and buy your book and start reading it, that’s a good sign. However, there would be some readers who may start airing their doubts about something in the book, or the grammar not being up to the mark. They may leave feedback as they were confused about some element in your book. And they will let you and the general browsing reader know about it in the feedback they leave wherever you make your book available to buy.
An edited manuscript ensures there is less confusion in the content.
3. No Grammar Irritation
It’s natural. I would even go ahead and say that it is expected that after all your efforts at having the best final draft for your manuscript, grammatical errors will still creep in. Who is going to correct those errors? A second pair of experienced eyes. So, if you are ready to self-publish your manuscript, or send a copy of it to a publishing house for acceptance, take a step back and get your manuscript edited by a book editor.
At least, do your best to self-edit your manuscript so that grammar errors don’t appear like irritating small stones while readers chew tasty morsels of your manuscript.
An edited manuscript ensures that grammar irritations remain at a negligible level.
What I Saw in a Published Book
The above examples show how grammatical errors crept in as the book editor assigned by the publishing house to edit the book missed catching them. There could also be the case that no book editor checked the manuscript at all. The final draft by the author was published as is.
4. Better Impression
If you seek to create a good first impression on your reader with your book, ensure good structure/plot/sentence/grammar errors in your book. If you self-publish your book and market it properly, you will have visitors coming to your ‘Buy’ page and checking out samples of your book pages. A clean manuscript creates a smooth reading experience.
Similarly, if you send a clean manuscript to the publisher, a good impression will be created on the book editor who marks your manuscript with something like, ‘seems interesting, can consider’.
An edited manuscript helps in creating a good first impression on the reader and the manuscript-approval-guy in any publishing house.
5. Better Chance of Success
A good book manuscript that you have written with so much focus, determination and patience has a better chance of success, than an error-ridden manuscript. Once the reader likes the reading experience that comes from reading a nice book, s/he may give word-of-mouth recommendation about your book on her social media platform. This can lead to an increase in book awareness, thereby leading to more book sales.
In the same way, a clean manuscript will get the manuscript-approval guy in any publishing house to give your book a chance to get published with them. Out of so many manuscripts that a publishing house receives daily for consideration, your manuscript can be placed on top of the heap of received manuscripts.
An edited manuscript can be like a metal badge of pride on your reputation that can make you, the author, stand out from the crowd. You stand a better chance of achieving your version of success with an edited manuscript.
Work With Me
Dear budding/established author, in case your book manuscript final draft is ready, you can get in touch with me to discuss your editing needs for a decent price. Here’s my portfolio to know more about my work.