If you take the time now – before sending your manuscript to a fiction editor for some professional attention – the editing process may be cheaper, and your final published book will be even better.

Authors and editors can work together to ensure better readability – this in turn will make your book more marketable and will result in better reviews.

I’m a freelance editorial professional, and my job is to look at manuscripts and check for issues with punctuation, grammar, typos, word choice, pace and inconsistencies. But there are many things that you – the novelist – can do to elevate your manuscript before you look for a book professional to copyedit, line edit and proofread your book.

Below are my final self-editing tips for indie fiction authors – click here for part one and part two!

21 – Review those exclamation marks!

Exclamation marks are used to indicate moments of tension, drama and/or humour.

When a reader sees one, they know they need to bring some energy to their reading.

But maintaining that level of energy for multiple sentences is hard work, and after a while your readers will stop putting in the effort.

This means that overusing exclamation marks stops them fulfilling their intended purpose.

Are you a little too fond of exclamation marks? How many is too many?

This is entirely up to you, but I’d recommend a maximum of one per paragraph. And never, ever use more than one at a time!!

22 – Naming your characters

Here are my top three tips for naming your characters:

a. Make sure you don’t have more than one character with the same name (unless it’s deliberate). It sounds obvious, but it does happen!

b. Don’t have characters with similar names. So don’t have a Shannon and a Sharon, or a Jack and a Jock.

c. If you are creating unique names, make sure the names are readable. So don’t call a character Zqpx. Although most people don’t read books out loud, they do have a head voice. And the head voice tries to articulate the words on the page – so make sure the names can be pronounced by other people.

For a more detailed discussion of how, what and when to name your characters, have a look here: Character Names

23 – Using page breaks

New chapters need to start at the top of a new page, but it’s important that you don’t just hit the return key multiple times to achieve this.

Although using the return key does push the chapter title onto a new page, if you make any changes to the previous chapter, this means the title will move up or down and may no longer be at the top of a new page.

Instead, make sure you use a proper page break.

To do this on a PC in MS Word, just hold down the ctrl key and tap the return key. This will give you a proper page break that won’t move around, no matter what you do with the previous chapters.

24 – BEST EVER SELF-EDITING TIP

You’ve made it to the end of my self-editing tips for fiction authors! I can promise you that I’ve saved the very best tip until last.

There is one step that will help you find:

– spelling mistakes

– words that are similar but not quite right

– missing full stops/periods

– repeated words

– missing words

– overly long sentences

– dense paragraphs

– words and phrases that you are a little too keen on

– consecutive sentences that start/end with the same word

So what is this incredible tip? It’s very simple. Just read your manuscript out loud.

You can either do this using your own voice, or you can use the read aloud function in MS Word. Adobe also has a similar function if you are working in .pdfs.

If you don’t follow any of my previous tips, I really recommend you do this one thing!

In Conclusion

This are my final self-editing tips for fiction authors – please see here for part 1 and part 2. And if any of the above tips are unclear, please do email me – I’d love to hear from you.

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