How to Self-Edit a Book: A Beginner's Guide to Proofreading

So you finished writing a book. Congratulations! And now sit down and let’s get to work.

If you’ve been following me on this series, you already know that there are four levels of editing a book needs to go through to make sure it’s polished and ready to be viewed by the naked eye:

1. Developmental Editing

2. Line Editing

3. Copyediting

4. Proofreading

Ideally, you’d hire professional editors to help you with all these editorial processes, but what if you don’t have the funds? I’ve got you covered.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can edit your own manuscript without spending your (nonexistant) funds on an editor. And this week, we’ll focus on proofreading.

What is Proofreading

While not as intellectual as developmental editing, where the characters and plot are evaluated at a high level, and not as refined as line editing, where style is of the essence, proofreading is like the humble street sweeper of your book. No one gives it more than a passing glance, but without it there would have been a lot of mess left (and yes, I realize that I am going to get a lot of heat for this comparison).

Proofreading takes place after typesetting has been done, and it’s the last chance to catch a mistake before it looks your reader in the eye and makes them question your professionalism. In other words—you need to be extra careful.

But yes—it’s boring, and you don’t really want to do it. You’d also love to delegate it to a friend, but just like with copyediting—it’s just too much of an ask for someone who’s helping you for free, and we’ve already established it that you don’t have the budget to pay for it (otherwise you wouldn't have been following this editing on a budget series).

It’s a pickle, yes, but pickles can be devoured, and so can this task.

How to Proofread on Your Own

If you Google Proofreading Your Own Work, you’ll find a number of useful articles with various techniques and methods to follow. But even though there is variety of methods, a few patterns emerge and seem to be shared by various proofreading-enthusiastic voices.

Here are a few methods many professional proofreaders recommends:

1. Reading in reverse—since it’s easy to get sucked into the story as you read, making you lose sight of spelling and punctuation, you might consider trying to read your manuscript from end to beginning, slowly going through each word.

2. Use text-to-voice processors—when listening to your manuscript read aloud, misspelled words will become apparent. Like I’ve said in the previous article—if two letters are misplaced inside a word, it is very hard for the human eye to catch it. But when you hear the annoying, mechanical voice flatly say “miskates” instead of “mistakes”, you’ll catch it.

3. Chunk it out—instead of going through the entire manuscript from top to bottom multiple times, each time focusing on one type of error, break it down into chapters, paragraphs, or pages, and work your way one chunk at a time, giving it multiple revisions from multiple lenses.

Using Technology for Proofreading

I’ve talked about it extensively throughout this series, and I’ll happily repeat it again—digital tools such as Grammarly and, yes, the behated AI can be a great tool for spotting grammar and punctuation mistakes. It doesn’t get bored or tired and won’t overlook two letters that swithced their saets (did you catch that?)

But since AI can sometimes go on its own little tangent or forget the task after a while, feed it a few paragraphs at a time and don’t forget to revisit the output.

Beta-Reader Feedback for Proofreading

Don’t. Just don’t.

Same as with copyediting—asking your friends to proofread is too big of an ask. But you can ask your friends to point out any issues if they come across them as they’re reading the manuscript for general feedback.

Final Thoughts

You’ve done it! You not only learned how to do your own proofreading, but you’ve also (maybe) completed my series of editing on a budget!

And I get it, editing, in all its ways and forms, is an investment of time, and it is not easy. But it will polish your book and make it bookshelf (or at least Kindle store) ready.

So to summarize, to proofread your manuscript, try:

1. Reading the book backwards

2. Using text-to-voice software

3. Working in chunks

4. Utilizing technology (spellchecking tools like Grammarly in particular)

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