Editing For Indies...

Everywhere an Indie author looks they'll read that you CAN NOT edit your own work!

How-some-ever; None of those prohibitors ever explain how a poor boy with not enough cash to eat three meals a day is supposed to pony up the $3500 bucks it takes to pay a commercial editor for the lower end of editing assistance on a finished work.

I have literally been told; "That doesn't matter! If you respect your work you do it!" Seriously? You spend the $3500 dollars that you Don't HAVE? How imaginative. That guy HAD to be a fiction writer! ... Science Fiction...

So... putting those prohibitions aside, and doing the task to be done with as good a quality as I can muster, I have discovered a couple of tricks that help.

One is enlarging the text to fill the entire screen. Sometimes having the type increased to that size, misspellings and punctuation goofs will jump out at you a little more clearly. Also, I for the life of me can't remember the name of the lil' gizmo just now... but... on the tool bar at the top is that lil' reverse P thing-a-ma-bob? Turn that on so you can see all the spacing and formatting. That will also help reveal some mistakes.

The third and most helpful thing I've found is my Kindle. Not only is it a SWEET electronic library... it is an AWESOME editing assistant for a poor aspiring author trying to turn out good work!

I email-to-kindle my finished manuscript. Right off, the biggest of formatting issues seem to pop out once that email has been converted to the kindle format.

Then, I turn on the Text to Speech Option of the kindle. Personally I use my Ipod ear buds. Though the computer generated voice sounds a lil' odd, misspellings, awkward wording and quite a few punctuation oddities JUMP out when it tries to pronounce and speak them!

I've found many tricky to "find" misspellings... when the Kindle "Sounded" weird trying to say the word!

Audioize your manuscript on your own personal Kindle as an AWESOME Text editing tool!

I follow along on my laptop and correct as I go. Just put the kindle on pause; make the corrections or rewording, hit go! and continue!

So... don't get your shorts in a knot when the prima donnas tell you that you can't. Just find the ways to make it happen!

~ BK Gore