STEP 1: HIRE A PROFESSIONAL COPYEDITOR I can’t be any clearer about it than this: hire at least one professional copyeditor to review your book. Don’t rely on spell-check. Don’t ask your friends. Don’t get your neighbor to look it over. I don’t care how confident you are that there are no mistakes. You’re wrong. They are there, and if you don’t hire professionals to find them, you’ll miss them, and then readers will think you are stupid. There is a lot of data on this, but average people only detect about 60 percent of errors, and even professionals usually only catch about 85 percent (that is why we have two different people review every manuscript we do for authors at Scribe). While your read-out-loud editing will catch a lot of the small, sloppy mistakes and wording issues, there are a whole other set of issues that professional proofreaders are looking for: small grammatical rules that native English speakers often don’t even realize exist. For example: • Do you know the difference between an en dash and an em dash? • Do you end sentences in prepositions? • Do you start too many sentences with conjunctions? These kinds of mistakes are not life-threatening, but they make the difference between a professional book and one that comes across as amateur. And beyond that, if Amazon gets too many reports about typos in your book, they will pull the book down. There are two distinct types of copyediting services: those that allow you to submit the manuscript and they manage their team internally, and marketplaces that allow you to find your own free- 234 · ThE SCriBE METhOD