How To Carry Out Book Proofreading?

There are many things to consider while proofreading a book or an ebook. A plan, a few tricks from the experienced people, tools, and a little self-care should help to make the process easier and more enjoyable. In the end, if you decide that DIY proofreading is not for you, that’s okay. Some agencies and freelancers are happy to help you out! Do you proofread your book after it’s been sent out for print or formatted for e-reading? Well, you should. Proofreading is the last stage of the editorial process before publishing and its goal is to catch any bugs that the writer, editor, or book designer or formatter have missed.

Is it necessary to proof-read?

By this point in the publishing process, you might be thinking that the copy editor has done it all. But, while a copyeditor will catch most errors while Book Proofreading, they won’t catch them all. Most editors agree that 95 percent is the industry standard corrected. Anyway, a copyeditor can’t correct errors that haven’t yet been made. Every time one opens the book file that is you, your copyeditor, the formatter, or book designer, an error can potentially be introduced!

Have you ever leaned on your space bar while reaching for something else and inserted extra spaces between words? Copied-pasted a section of text and discovered you missed copying the last word? You know what I am talking about, then. Because these things can happen to a book’s designers and editors, and because they will receive your book after a copyeditor works his or her editing, any errors that are there in the design process will never be seen by your copyeditor. All of this points to the importance of having a last look at your book even If it is completed. You need to be your book’s first unbiased reader.

Types of your publishing:

There are many ways to proofread a book. How you proofread it will depend on the publishing format you have chosen. It could be:

1. Book (as in printed copy)

2. eBook (as in pdf/kindle)

If your book is headed for print, you’ll need to proofread the pdf of it, that will be sent to the printer or print-on-demand service you’ve selected. If your book will be an ebook/kindle book, it makes sense to proofread it on an online e-reader.

In the past, professional proofreaders proofread books on the papers. Nowadays, most proofreaders will proofread a book with software that allows them to highlight mistakes on a PDF. Also, you can mark errors with proofreading stamps, which can be too much fun.

Ebook proof-reading

Proofreading an ebook requires a different strategy than the print. You can’t mark up the text as you would do in a print book. The text is not static, so you need another method for keeping track of all the errors.

Print Book proof-reading

Unlike eBooks, you can use all the traditional methods like marking with a pen, pencil, highlighter, bookmark, etc. 

Here are some simple strategies you can use:

Plan.

There are a few essential steps to proofreading a document/thesis/book/paper. Decide the order in which you’ll do things. Keep track of your progress with each book, so you can find ways to make proofreading more effective. To improve accuracy & efficiency, some proofreaders will convert the text from the designer’s PDF and paste the text into Word. This allows them to use the Word add-in ‘PerfectIt Pro’ to efficiently check for inconsistencies in sentences.

Read it out aloud

Your brain will behave like the “autocorrect” function in a word processing program when you say it out loud. That means it will tell you what should be on the page instead of what is there. You can even take the help of non -reader people as their brain is not suited to autocorrect like casual readers.

Make use of resources

Like every other writer, you can always take help from outer sources for Book Proofreading and Editing . Now there will be questions about where to find those? For which you can refer to my other article “Should you use a freelancer or a proofreading company”