Authors: you'll be horrifed at the errors you'll find if you look at your book without reading it

After you've read your new masterpiece 183 times, sit a bit farther back from your screen and LOOK at the pages—but don't read them.

You'll probably be amazed, and maybe even horrified, at all of the errors you detect when you are not concerned with content, meaning, grammar, spelling, punctuation and story-telling artistry.

I aim my eyes at the three-o'clock position and maker a clockwise scan on each page, but do what works best for you.

Check your book for these bloopers:

1. Wrong typefaces or wrong fonts, (not necessarily the same thing) particularly when text is pasted-in from another source
2. Commas that should be periods—and vice versa
3. Straight punctuation that should be curly "typographers' marks"
4. Curlies that curl in the wrong direction
5. Missing spaces between paragraphs or sections
6. Bad justification in the last line of a page
7. Chopped-off descenders where you decreased line spacing or if the bottom of a text box is too close to the text
8. Wrong-size bullets
9. Rivers
10. Too-big word spacing
11. Normal letters that should be ligatures (more for large type than in body text).
12. Accidental spaces after bullets
13. Improper hyphenation
14. Roman text that should be italic, and vice versa
15. Ignoring highlighted warnings in MS Word
16. Automatically accepting MS Word suggestions
17. Gray text that should be black
18. Insufficient space adjacent to images
19. Images or text boxes that floated over the margin
20. Images or text boxes that "slid' down and covered up footers
21. Missing periods at sentence ends
22. Missing opening or closing quote marks
23. Periods that should be inside a closing parentheses—or outside
24. Repeated words
25. Wrong headers, missing headers, switched verso and recto headers
26. Subheads that are too close to the text above and too far from the text below
27. Too much space between lines in a multi-line title, chapter name or subhead
28. Pages with numbers that should not show nunbers ("blind folios")
29. Words that shifted from the bottom of one page to the top of the next page
30. And one that does require reading: chapter names in the table of contents that don't reflect a change made in the actual chapter name
31. And another: a topic not in the index because you added something after completing the index

More in my 1001 Powerful Pieces of Author Advice: Learn to plan, write, title, edit, format, cover, copyright, publicize, publish and sell your pbooks and ebooks

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