HOW TO PREPARE YOUR MANUSCRIPT FOR AN EDITOR | Prepare Your Book for an Editor | Natalia Leigh

hello everybody welcome back to my channel my name is natalia lee i'm an indie author and full-time freelance editor and today i am back with another video one that you guys voted on in my monday poll and the video you guys chose for this week is how to prepare your manuscript for an editor i've received a lot of questions about this and i've also over the years that i've been doing this received so many different types of files um you know files with different types of formatting maybe different types of problems that the author didn't know that they needed to correct sometimes i have to send files back to authors in order to correct those problems before they can resubmit so i hope that this video will help you guys get prepared for sending your manuscript to an editor whether that's a developmental editor a line editor or a copy editor do keep in mind though when you're working with a professional editor some editors have very specific requirements for what they want you to do to your document before sending it to them the tips i'm going to give you today are one going to be like a general overview something that's going to pretty much be a hundred percent safe for any editor you might be sending your project to and number two it's going to be uh perfectly accurate for enchanted ink publishing so if you are going to be submitting to eip for editorial services whether it's a critique copyedit proofread well proofread would be different so really just a critique or a copy at it then you can definitely follow these tips and these guidelines to a tea and you will be good to go now speaking of tea i actually have some right here i just poured it for myself and look this is my mom got me this cup for christmas we celebrated christmas early we celebrated last weekend since greg and i live kind of far away we thought it would be best to celebrate like a weekend early so there wasn't as much traffic into denver and my mom got me this little mug and it has like christmas dogs all over it i absolutely love it so my sister told me that she hates the way i sip tea in my videos so if she's watching maybe i'll do a loud sip just for her oh it's too hot okay well let's get that out of the way and let's talk about how you need to format your manuscript in order to submit it to a professional editor now there's a lot to go over so i wrote everything down here i have an entire list we're just going to work off of this because i have everything organized so first step is to self-edit now this one is kind of a no-brainer but i do think it's necessary to mention because let's say you're submitting for i don't know copy editing this will be a good example if you want a professional editor to copy edit your manuscript you need to have gone over it yourself preferably a few different times you could even have sent it to beta readers before you send it to really a developmental editor or a copy editor so you want to make sure that you are revising as much as you possibly can and you are getting that manuscript as clean as possible and as free of errors as possible before you submit to any editor not only will it help them do the best job they possibly can but it could also help you in the long run as well some editors some copy editors will offer different rates depending on how clean or messy your work is so by putting in a lot of work up front to get that work as clean as possible that's really going to help you down the road no matter which type of editor you are hiring so make sure you are doing multiple rounds of self edits before you are submitting for editorial work okay tip number two is to have your manuscript in a word doc format and i am very aware that not everybody writes in microsoft word you might write in word you might write scrivener you might write in google docs you might write in pages like on a mac so i know that people write in a lot of different programs but the majority of editors you will come across will edit books in microsoft word so you want to make sure that you are providing them the right file type using me as an example i edit on a windows laptop so anytime a client sends me let's say a manuscript in a pages document which is something that's made on a mac i cannot open it because i don't have the right um i don't know i don't have the right program on my computer to open a pages document so i have to reach back out to them i have to ask them to please export as a word doc which is dot d o c or dot d o c x and then they have to resubmit it to me because i can't even open it so you want to make sure you are submitting your manuscript to your editor as a word doc um something else that is best not to do is submitting a google docs link to an editor now it's not a big problem i've had a lot of clients submit their work to me as a google doc link however this is one of those things that your editor is already going to be working incredibly hard for you so by submitting a google doc link you're telling them you know please go to my link export the file that i wrote and then you can get started but it would be best if when you are done on your google docs go to the what is it it's either export or download from the drop down menu on google docs and from there you can choose to export or download your google docs file as a dot doc x and then that is what you want to submit to your editor again it's not a big problem if you provide them a link to your google doc but in order to just be as professional and polite as you can it's best that you export and download that as a word doc file and then attach that to the email and send it to your editor that way rather than asking them to jump through multiple more hoops just to get access to your files okay tip number three following up on needing to submit a clean word doc to your editor i have quite a few tips here about how to make sure that word doc that you're submitting to your editor is formatted in the cleanest simplest way possible and it's going to be in a format that's very easy for an editor to work with whether developmental line copy editor etc so i'm going to read through some of these because there's a lot here tai is going to go be mean to gypsy okay anyway i'm sitting in front of my window and i can see the horses out in the pasture and ty can be a little bit of a bully to gypsy and she's trying to take a nap right now and i see him like creeping up on her so sorry but they sometimes distract me um so you want to use a simple font i prefer times new roman 12 point and something to keep in mind is that you want to use a serif font times new roman is a serif font and serif there he goes again the serifs are they're like the little kind of like tails and marks that you will see on a font whereas a sans serif they don't have those nice little like marks and tails on them and most editors prefer working with a serif font a serif font is much easier on the eye and it's also easier to detect errors when you're using a serif font a sans serif they're so it's like they're all so similar the letters are that it's not as easy on the eye to catch things that are wrong so i recommend using a simple times new roman which is a serif font and it's best to put it in 12 point um i've had some clients submit in like 10 point font and it's so so small that i either have to zoom in to like 150 to work on it or i have to resize the entire document which will of course mess up any other like special sizing or font formatting that you had going on so try to just prepare that ahead of time times new roman 12 point font uh you don't want justification justification is like if you select your entire microsoft word document and you justify it what it's going to do is create those nice like straight lines on either margin now when you do that it causes lines to pull and let's say your editor needs to bump up a page break add a page break anything like that it can cause your words to get super stretched out across the entire page and justification is something that does not need to be touched on until you get to the formatting phase so this is this is much too early in the process to be adding justification to your document so instead just have it like left aligned and indented and we're going to talk about indents next so this is something that i have mentioned in previous videos and this is something that's really important for everybody to be aware of because it's a problem that i come across very frequently when preparing my own clients manuscripts for editing so when i open a new manuscript document and i'm getting ready to start editing it i have a long checklist of things i go through and that i have to clean up if the author hasn't already done it before i can even get started with editing and manual tabs or like using the space bar to try to indent the first line of a new paragraph is one of the most consistent and biggest problems that i come across so you do not want to be creating your own indentation with um the space bar and you do not want to be hitting the tab key on your keyboard and forcing those manual tabs this is something that will really mess with you during the formatting phase and it's something that either your editor is going to need to address or your formatter is going to need to address and sometimes they will they won't even touch it they will send it back to you so that you fix it before resubmitting because if you have manual tabs everywhere or if you try to indent the first line of new paragraphs with a random number of spaces which i have seen it makes your book honestly quite messy for an editor to try to work with or a formatter to try to work with so instead you need to go through and remove all of those manual tabs or if you spaced them out you need to go to all of those remove all the additional spacing and then use words paragraph indentation function it is very simple and easy to use on mine and i know that the way that my word is laid out versus the way word might be laid out like on a mac is going to be a little bit different but on mine i simply go up to like the toolbar on top i select the paragraph drop down and then i set the default indent first line at like .25 or 0.3 that's what i prefer um i think the like words default is 0.5 which is totally fine but for like formatting down the line and for published books a 0.5 first line indent is much too large so that's why i prefer doing like a 0.25 or a 0.3 just set that as the default and then you never have to mess with it again you never have to touch it and you never have to hit that tab key to force a manual indent it's going to be a mess your editor is going to have to remove it so do the do the kind thing and remove all of that manual indentation before you send it to your editor okay next is line spacing so what you don't want to do is send your editor a single spaced word doc for editing those lines are just way too close together they are way too scrunched and it makes editing very difficult so instead of having single line spacing what i prefer most as an editor is to either work with 1.5 spacing or double uh double spaced lines and that just offers enough of white space that my eyes can track the pages and can track the words on the pages very very easily i don't get lost um you know my eyes don't get confused about what line they should be shifting to anything like that so it can just really simplify and streamline the editorial process so before you submit it to your editor either set it at 1.5 or 2 slash you know double line spacing just to get it prepared so that they have plenty of room and plenty of white space to work with while they are editing your document now going along with that um you don't want to add an additional like line break you know you don't want to hit enter twice to create an additional like paragraph break between paragraphs this is something i have seen a lot as well so you want you want your text to just flow naturally and of course when you bump down to a new paragraph once you have that um default indentation turned on it will already go ahead and indent your first line and then you can just keep writing but there should not be any additional spacing before or after a paragraph a chunk of text so when you get to the end of a paragraph don't hit the paragraph or the paragraph key don't hit the enter button twice because that's going to drop you down one line and then it's going to drop you down another line and you're going to have two paragraph marks now if you turn on the hidden characters or the paragraph marks in word you'll see what i'm talking about and that's your paragraph that's like where the paragraph breaks so you don't want additional space between paragraphs you want all of those to be like all the space needs to be perfectly aligned so no additional spacing before or after your paragraphs all right two more things within the formatting category i know that there's a lot to cover here but believe me it'll make your document super clean and your editor will love you for it and it's always good when your editor loves you for all the preparation you do beforehand so the next thing you want to do is put in a page break at the end of a chapter so some uh some authors instead of using a page break when they get to the end of a chapter they will just hit the enter key until they get to their new page and that's okay like it looks okay when you're just writing but if anything shifts it's go all of your pages are going to shift so a page break makes sure that no matter how much text is added or removed before that page break that chapter will always break at the exact same place and then that'll push you onto a new page which is where your new chapter should start so at the end of a chapter when you're done before you go to your next chapter again on word you can go up to like the toolbar on the top and you can go to insert and then you're going to insert a page break and then it'll bump you down to the next page and that is where you're going to start your new chapter now the last thing that you want to do to prepare um the formatting of your document for your editor is to remove any fancy styling or formatting so this might be um different font faces so if you have a lot of different fonts uh let's say that you didn't submit your manuscript as a times new roman let's say you submitted it as like calibri or something or like ariel sans serif your editor is likely going to need to change that so if you have like a body font that's arial and then you have text messages in like baskerville or some other font when your editor goes through and has to change it to time times new roman or whatever their favorite like serif is it's going to change everything so you're going to lose that styling anyway so it's best to just remove it for them and then later on in formatting is when you will either do a different font face or for text messages um something that we've been doing for our clients that we love is putting text messages and little text message bubbles or maybe you have like a handwritten note we like to put those on like parchment pages so again this is something that's going to be done later on in the formatting phase but for your editor keep it as clean and simple as possible something else you want to remove is going to be like drop caps remove your drop caps keep that super simple you don't want a bunch of different like paragraph styling word has a style panel where you can select text and then like assign different styles to it but again it's best to just keep it all clean no styling and then all of that styling and all the really nice beautiful fancy formatting will come in later but you don't want your editor having to deal with that and you also don't want to submit something to the editor and then they have to do a manuscript-wide change and it's going to remove all that formatting anyway so just prepare for them ahead of time remove all the fancy styling all the fancy formatting and then that can be put back in later when your book is ready for the formatting phase okay the last thing we're going to talk about ancillary documents so these are like the extra documents that you can provide to your editor and you don't always need to and it depends on what type of edit you're getting from your editor so let's say you're getting a developmental edit or you're getting a manuscript critique at um enchanted ink publishing something that you might want to send along to your editor is like a letter to the editor i get these often when i'm doing manuscript critiques and i really love them i'm working on a critique right now i'm probably going to finish it up this week it's the second novella i've worked on for this specific author and he always submits like a letter to the editor and i love it because i will read the novella first so that i gather all of my own thoughts and opinions and i'm not being influenced by anything he's concerned about but then once i'm done and i've you know made notes to myself before i start my second read-through i will read that letter to the editor i'll read over all the concerns that the author has um you know there are always questions for me to answer and i love that because if an author has questions going into a critique or into a developmental edit i want to make sure that i'm touching on those and answering them as fully you know as i possibly can so i love receiving that letter to the editor with the additional questions and concerns and then i can make sure to address those in my editorial letter before i return it to the author so again it's going to depend on who your editor is and if they want these extra documents but if you're working with eip especially on a manuscript critique is where we really see this it is perfectly fine and even in in my opinion smiled upon to send a document with all of your questions and concerns so that your editor can keep a specific eye out for that preferably when they're doing their second read-through i always do two read-throughs when i am doing a critique because the first read-through is like a it's just a way to absorb all of the information and you can never tell really an editor can't tell what your intentions and goals are for a project until they've read all the way through it so make sure if you're getting a developmental a critique any type of like heavy content edit ask your editor how many read-throughs do you do because you want like a minimum of two read-throughs the first read-through is just gathering all the information understanding the intentions making preliminary notes and then the next read-through is where all the magic happens because now your editor knows what you were trying to achieve and they can better guide you down the road of revisions to achieving that thing that you are setting out to do so a letter to the editor with questions and concerns can be great for a critique or developmental edit now for a copy edit you could provide a style sheet but most people are not going to have this and it's not a problem if you don't have a style sheet going into a copy edit because a professional copy editor will provide you a style sheet this is so important my friends if your copy editor does not provide you a style sheet oh how do i say this in a nice way uh then they probably aren't somebody that you want to work with again make sure that you ask them leading into the copy edit before you put any money down make sure they're going to provide this to you a style sheet is kind of like a guidebook or dictionary for your specific project it's 100 unique and tailored to your story and who you are as a writer it's going to have things on there like um spelling variations spelling distinctions you know even like the word leap like to leap over a fallen tree some people like to use leaped and some people like to use lept as the simple past tense so either of those are perfectly fine for simple past but your copy editor make needs to make sure that if you're using left that you're using left all the way through it's not he left over the log and then she leaped over the river so a spelling distinction would be okay leaped or left for example and there are so many instances of that where if you're not trained to catch it you will read leaped and then you will read left 50 pages later and you won't catch that there's anything wrong there but a copy editor should be looking for consistency so that spelling distinction will be put on your style sheet um it'll have a list of any like formatting changes that your editor made you know if they did silent changes like making sure that all of your apostrophes and you know quotation marks are curly quotes instead of straight quotes and they do a search and replace throughout the entire manuscript that's going to be like a silent formatting change or removing spacing before and after paragraph marks stuff like that that should be listed on your style sheet it should have a list of all the characters places um important terms things to keep track of it's just it's really an important document for not only you as the author to have but it's imperative that a proofreader have your style sheet because they need to reference that style sheet while they're proofreading your document and i said earlier like you don't have to provide a copy editor a style sheet because a professional copy editor will provide one to you but if you have very specific spellings if you are um what's a good example some authors like to capitalize very specific terms even if you know maybe to my editor brain i'm saying you know that does not need capitalization if the author comes to me beforehand and they provide me a style sheet and they say you know i'm aware this word doesn't need to be capitalized and probably technically shouldn't be capitalized but i'm aware of it and i want it to be capitalized and here it is on my style sheet that i'm providing to you then i can more closely adhere to exactly what that author wants instead of going through the entire document and removing what you know i might see is like superfluous capitalization whereas they were like i really wanted that there but they didn't provide me that style sheet so i didn't know that going into the edit so if you have very specific spelling preferences capitalization anything like that it could be very very helpful to write up a style sheet it doesn't have to be anything crazy it doesn't have to be anything professional i'm just like a list of terms capitalization spelling anything like that just list it out in a very clean word document and you can provide that to your editor before they start your copy edit so then they're going into the edit knowing what your preferences are another important one that i come across very often is uh uk versus us versus um canadian spelling so sometimes i'll step into a book and i'll see that the majority of it is u.s spelling preferences and then some of it is randomly uk and in some instances you know canadian spelling can have like a little bit of a mix of both so that one can be a little bit tricky okay sorry guys my camera randomly died there so we're back now um so we were talking about spelling so if you have a spelling preference and all of us are going to i want all of my books to adhere to american spelling conventions so i would need to know if i were hiring a copy editor that they were on the lookout for any um like rogue uk you know spelling variants like gray and gray g-r-e-y is more of a uk approach g-r-a-y is an american spelling approach so they're not misspelled but your editor needs to know do you want the uk do you want the us what do you want here so that i can make sure that it's consistent all the way out so if you do decide to provide a style sheet make sure to put on there what um your spelling preferences are and again you don't have to do this not not very many um clients submit a style sheet to me and usually you're not going to as long you're not going to need to as long as you tell your editor um you know us uk spelling conventions but it could be helpful if you already know that you're using some non-traditional methods in your manuscript that it could be could it could be good to let your editor know that beforehand so that they're not going through and like undoing all the hard work that you did and then you'll have to go through and reject all those changes or do a search and replace or however you want to correct that so letter to the editor with questions and concerns maybe if you are getting a manuscript critique or developmental edit and then for a copy edit you could provide a style sheet if you want to and for a proofread absolutely 100 you need to provide a style sheet that should be provided to you by your copy editor and um something else that we should touch upon now this is kind of just a little add-on and we can talk about this more in a different video but for a proofread if you are submitting to a professional editor for proofread make sure you are submitting to them either in a formatted pdf or a physical copy some editors prefer a physical copy some editors prefer a pdf i used to request both from my clients i would actually proofread on the pdf but then i wanted a physical copy so that i could see it in front of me and point out anything that i noticed upon opening that book and looking through it so you shouldn't be providing a word document to your proofreader that's something that you're going to provide to your copy editor and then after the formatting is all done and it's been exported as a pdf for print that is what you're going to give to your proofreader because you want your proofreader to look you know be on the lookout for any incorrect formatting inconsistent formatting maybe there there's one chapter that's missing headers and page numbers and they're not going to be able to catch that stuff if it hasn't already been formatted so make sure you're formatting and exporting as a pdf before you give that to your proofreader okay my friends that is all i thought this was going to be a super quick video but i actually had a lot more to go over than i thought i was going to if there are any other specific questions you have about what you should or shouldn't be doing to your manuscript prior to submitting it to your editor please let me know in the comments down below again if you are working with enchanted ink publishing this video is going to be a perfect guide because it's our these are our preferred um specifications i guess you could say this is exactly what we like to see from authors when they provide their manuscripts to us whether for a critique a copy edit or a proofread but again i'm sure there are things that i might have missed there might be things that maybe your editor has told you that i don't tell any of our clients and you can leave all that down below if you are interested in editing formatting cover design or other indie author services make sure to come check us out at enchantedinkpublishing.com we currently have a team of seven we have five editors one cover designer and one formatter we are working very very hard on so many different projects let me give you a little peek at some of the books that we uh have recently worked on and that we received in our p.o box now this is in no means all of the books that we have i have a shelf full of client books but these are some of the ones that we recently received in our po box and i wanted to show you because they're just gorgeous so we have goddess of limbo by leah falls i copy edited this and then greg did the formatting and thea our incredibly talented artist and cover designer did some illustrations in here this thing is a beast it is almost 700 pages long so this is one that we worked on this year here is one that we did a manuscript critique for and formatting the crimson gods by chris christian absolutely gorgeous gorgeous book like there are some illustrations in here that will just blow your mind when you see them let's see if i can find one for you really quick because they're just so beautiful look at this look at that is that not like one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen so we did formatting on this project just so beautiful let's see what do we have here we've got academy for the gifted by hudson worm now we worked on hudson's first book as well that one was not the air we had the pleasure of proofreading and formatting this one this is such a fun story it really gave me like it gave me some gossip girl vibes which i love i was madly in love with gossip girl we did some really cool formatting for this project so we received this one and then another one we received is promised prophecy by jamie lee and we did both a manuscript critique and copy editing for this client it is such a fun book and it's just gorgeous i honestly like i love receiving books in the p.o box especially hardcovers i've always been a fan of hardcovers and something that's kind of interesting is that all these books that we recently received they all have matte book covers so please tell me everyone is there like a a push for matt covers that's going on right now because all of these are matte and i've done both matte and glossy covers for my books but anyway i just wanted to show you guys some of these so we have had the pleasure and the honor of working on so many absolutely amazing projects this year we have a full roster of clients for next year so if you are interested in working with us please make sure to reach out sooner instead of later because especially for editing and cover design right now we're booking out quite far so if you know you want to work with us in 2020 it's best to shoot us an email today go to enchantingpublishing.com and you can fill out the little contact form and then we're trying to get back to those within one to two business days and from there we can work on getting you scheduled on the calendar so i want to do a little shout out to all of our awesome fantastic talented authors thank you to everybody all of you authors who have sent us copies we absolutely love filling our bookshelf with your beautiful books thank you for watching this video i really hope it helped you and make sure you give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it subscribe down below hit the bell notification so that you're notified when new videos go out and if you want to help decide which video is coming out next make sure that you are voting in my polls i post those every monday now and then i film one to two days after that either on a tuesday or a wednesday so try to jump on that poll quickly so that your voice can be heard when it comes to what video i'm filming next okay everybody this has been a super long video i'm gonna drink my tea and wrap it up and i will see you in the next one bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Natalia Leigh

Views: 11,422

Keywords: writing tips, best writing advice, writing advice, how to write a novel, authortube, natalia leigh, beginner writing mistakes, tips for new writers, basic writing tips, how to outline a book, outline a book, outlining a novel, how to outline a novel, how to write a book, how to write a book in word, how to self publish a book, tips for starting a book, how to prepare your book for an editor, working with an editor, prepare your manuscript for an editor

Id: gssg68ZUkw4

Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021