Last time, I covered Getting Your Manuscript Back. If you missed it, you can check out the blog article here.
This one, I want to talk about proofreading.
Proofreading - like all the stages of creating a book - is so important. And you have a few choices with how you do it. You can always outsource, but I do my proofreading myself.
My biggest tip is to not look at it in the same format. If you (like me) have written your book on a computer, do not proofread on one if you can help it. Print it out, or read it on your phone. Better yet, get out the ultimate 90s font and put the whole manuscript into Comic Sans.
No, I'm not kidding. I stumbled across a short article written by Dave Greenbaum in 2014, that spoke about proofreading in Comic Sans. The theory goes that most people see the font as childish, or just flat out don't like it, and as such, tend to be more critical about anything written in it.
Another 'hack' for proofreading is to set Microsoft word to read the text aloud to you. Once you hear it, you're more likely to pick up the mistakes in it. Of course, if your version of Word doesn't have the feature, you can always read it aloud yourself, or check out other programs which do the same sort of thing.
And, of course, the disclaimer - I use weird words. There isn't a text to speech program on our realm that's able to say Q'Aralide right at the moment, so I don't use the program option. If I'm struggling with a scene, I read aloud, and get some very odd looks from my workmates seeing I was proofing in my lunch hour.
Stay tuned for what comes next - formatting.