Even when a book cover is beautifully designed, it usually takes me three nanoseconds to recognize an amateur book and cringe. It's like my first homemade dress. I was thirteen, and that piece of work couldn't have been mistaken for couture at 100 yards. Homemade bread, good. Homemade dress, not so much.

There are dramatic differences between homemade and couture clothing in the material, the fit, and the finish. And ironically, the couture is often far more labor-intensive with handmade techniques. It’s more homemade than my first sewing attempt, except the craftsmanship is impeccable. So if you’re self-publishing, that’s what I want for you.

Professional editing addresses all of that: material, fit, and finish. Most of my editorial time is spent on material and fit: asking refining questions, sorting out which material belongs in which book, arranging ideas logically, emphasizing whatever zings, streamlining every sentence, making every word count. And then there are the handmade finishing details that distinguish the professional from the homemade book in a glance. (Some people even believe those are the only things editors do, when proofreading is the least of our talents.)

People might still buy your homemade book and love it. (I was just as smart in my ugly dress.) And some are willing to wade through a rambling dissertation, sifting through the chaff to seek your message. However, other people won’t bother. When it’s instantly obvious that you had no professional support with the finish, they figure you didn’t consult about your content very thoroughly either.

It's relatively simple to deliver a couture-worthy book. Complete editing for material and fit are personalized for each author and project. However, I can share many universal finishing details. Mastering even some of these yourself can save you many hours of editing time, and these details alone will give your book a more credible appearance.

The Writers’ Resort Top Ten No Cringing Checklist:

1. 1.Center only titles, possibly headings. Never center the text. In back cover copy, ad copy, brochures, or poems, do not center. Use left or full-justification. If you’re using full-justification, stay tuned for Item 9.
   

2. 2.Use a serif font, rather than a sans serif, for the main body. (Serifs are these little strokes that cap and underline each letter. Sans means without. Common serif fonts include Bookman, Garamond, Palatino, and Georgia. San serifs include Arial, Helvetica, and Copperplate.) Serif fonts are considered to be more readable and are traditional for long text. Sans serifs can be used for modern-styled headings if you like. Using sans serifs for the whole book, or what’s worse, using script fonts, will look homemade.
   

3. 3.Type one space after each period. If you type two, then it’s obvious you learned to type pre-computer, and you're probably over forty, like me. It's so engrained that I frequently employ Find/Replace for a two-space to one-space correction in my own work.
   

4. 4.Tuck the periods and commas inside quotation marks, like “this." Don't let them hang out like “that". (I'm an American editor. British rules are different.) An easy way to remember is to think of periods and commas as little kids who have to stay indoors, while question marks and exclamation points are big kids who are allowed to go out.
   

5. 5.Curtail emphatic italics, capitals, quotation marks, and exclamation points. Read your material aloud, and listen to someone else read it aloud. You'll hear whether they get your meaning, and sing along with your emphasis and cadence. If not, reword the sentence to place the stress where you want it.
   

6. 6.Keep your point of view consistent. Are you addressing "you," as I am here, or is it "we" or "they"? Don’t switch that around, especially not mid-sentence.
   

7. 7.Be alert for possessive/contraction confusion and other common word usage errors. It can happen even when you know the rules. Words are stored in your brain phonetically and it’s also human nature to see what you expect to see, so double-check for the most likely errors, such as it's and its, and you're and your. Even A and an are frequently missed. For usage clarification on a wide range of often confused words, see my colleague Barbara McNichol’s Word Trippers at http://barbaramcnichol.com/buy_word_trippers.html
   

8. 8.Learn your idiosyncratic errors. One of mine is a substitution between my and by, or me and be, again proving that brains store phonetically. (These sounds are formed the same way, only one is voiced and one is unvoiced.)
   

9. 9.Hyphenate, especially if you’re using full justification. If you hold a page at a distance, and you see rivers of space running down the page, then hyphenation is missing or ineffective. Self-published books often have the words of one line allsqueezedtogether while t h e n e x t   i s    a l l     s p a c e y. The goal is to have each line at the same length, give or take five characters. Microsoft Word is an editor's nightmare in many ways, and then you face another hurdle if you hand off your Word document to a POD service to set up your final layout. When they send the galleys, you'll find these spacing problems all over. Do request those corrections. And then check again, because every round of hyphenation upsets the balance of the lines all around. Learn the traditions governing hyphens and widows and the like.  (See how ragged the edge of this paragraph is without hyphenation? If I hyphenate for my browser width, it won’t necessarily match yours.)
   

10. Know your hyphens: N-dashes are the short hyphenation dashes, like the one I just used, while M-dashes—named for the width of the n and the m in a variable font—are used where a colon or a pair of parenthesis might serve, as in this sentence. There are no spaces beside either dash.
    

10. 10.Kerning is beautiful. See how TODAY is automatically kerned for me in this font? (I think you’re seeing it the way I do.) Without kerning, the A and the Y stand next to each other in their separate boxes and appear as A Y. Kerning tucks them closer to keep their spacing consistent. Even in this computer era, professional typesetting is still an art.
    

In general, get a style guide and look up things you aren't sure about. Some traditions have changed in the past generation and will continue to change. I use Chicago Manual of Style for book editing. Journalists are more likely to use Associated Press. Whatever you’re using, and whenever you choose exceptions to their rules, do so deliberately and consistently. For example, I’m with Chicago on e-mail, retaining the hyphen with its abbreviation of electronic, which is so useful for other combinations. However, Web site is too weird for me when almost everyone who isn’t a professional editor has already switched to website. Chicago makes some of its Q & A column public and free online, and it’s witty and wonderful. One answer even agreed personally with the website call, “but it wouldn’t be Chicago.”

Yes, your book will first be judged by its cover. Go to an actual bookstore and study all the books on the shelf where your book belongs. Styles do change. However, you’ll always see readable fonts, great titles, effective colors, and professional design. A blurb from a famous person never hurts.  And match all your front matter to the format of traditional published books, page by page. Copy everything the professionals do if you want to look professional.

And here’s a bonus thought about material and fit: start in the exciting part, as though it’s a novel, even if it isn’t one. Many self-published books begin with excessively long back stories—what inspired the authors and prompted these books—when brief forewords or prefaces would serve better. Or they pack their openings with extensive definitions or procedures. Find out what your audience already knows, and whenever possible, tuck that extra background information into the appendices for those who want it. Readers have what I think of as the Yearbook Effect. They look themselves up in their own yearbooks first, and they’re even reading your book to learn about themselves as well. So tell them about yourself in the end. By then, they care.

See also “Is Self-Publishing Self-Punishment?” my entry last September 16, 2008.

Best wishes,

Gwyn

Text © Gwyn Nichols 2008

Photo © Dre Schwartz, iStockPhoto #000005330500