A book must go through many stages of development before it is ready to be published. Unless you are an established author who has an in-house editor supplied to you by a publisher, online book editing services are a vital step in this challenging process.

Professional online book editing services can help you get your book into the shape it needs to be to make it to the shelves in the first place.

Types of Online Book Editing Services

There are many online book editing services available to writers to help them during the creation stages. These include online dictionaries, thesauruses, writing software, and interactive writing workshops and critique groups.

All of these can be useful to varying degrees – depending on your personal writing style, habits, strengths, and weaknesses, or on the experience of the book group.

However, hiring online book editing services is where the professional development of your manuscript begins. The most difficult stage is getting the book you have worked and reworked into marketable shape. It mus be ready to be sent to agents and publishers or submitted directly to the self-published marketplace.

Professional online editors provide a fresh set of eyes to catch any mistakes, typos, or plot inconsistencies before you send your manuscript out into the competitive professional world.  Here multitudes of documents are vying for attention and the competition is fierce.

Levels of Online Book Editing Services

The editing can include further developmental work on the story – finding plot holes or character inconsistencies via line editing. Or, it can be a more technical copyedit. Copyediting involves checking each sentence and paragraph to ensure everything is spelled correctly and makes sense grammatically.

Hiring a professional editor is essential to the success of your book. Your book should stand out for the content and for the effort you have put into it. It should not contain embarrassing mistakes or plot inconsistencies not spotted in time.

Professional online editing services ensure that everything – from format to story content, right down to every little detail – is perfect. This means you can finally relax and simply enjoy feeling proud of your finished product.

Online Book Editing Services and Style Guides

online book editing services - image of hand with penSummary: Online book editing services can help you get your document ready to send to publishers. Ensure that your manuscript conforms to standard style guides such as Chicago Manual of Style, Modern Language Association, or the American Psychological Association.

By making sure your manuscript is properly formatted, you are presenting a professional document to a potential publisher. That level of professionalism will help to make a publisher look more seriously at your book.

If you’re considering online book editing services, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve got a book that you want to get published. You’ve written a whole book, and you want to give it every bit of help. Make sure that a publisher is going to take the time to read what you’ve got to say. Online book editing services can help you.

Most writers produce a manuscript that does not conform to basic editing standards outlined in a variety of style guides. You may have brilliant things to say, but without knowledge of editing guidelines, your manuscript is likely to be ignored and returned with a form letter.

It is immediately apparent to an editor whether or not a document is following a standard style guide. If a manuscript is unformatted, it means a lot of extra work for a publisher.  before the work is ready to be printed, it must be completely edited. Thus, agents return your beloved book without giving it a chance.

Style Guides

All publishers follow a style guide of one sort of another. The most common style guides are the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS or Chicago), the Modern Language Association (MLA), or the American Psychology Association (APA).

Without knowing how to write a manuscript that conforms to one of those style guides, how are you going to get it looked at by a publisher?

The style guides set forth hundreds of formatting, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and dialogue rules. These rules are necessary to follow but difficult to learn. It is especially confusing if you’re learning from scratch, without the basic knowledge of standard formatting.

The editors at FirstEditing.com provide professional online book editing services. We ensure your document is formatted correctly and conforms to the style guide of your choosing.

The team of editors has expert knowledge of CMS, MLA, and APA. Plus, they have experience in ensuring that a manuscript follows all of those important little rules, rules that a publisher will be expecting you to follow.

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