What’s Wrong with My Manuscript?

Many writers are stunned when their manuscripts are rejectedby a publisher for editing reasons. Some writers have jumped the gun in publishing their books, omitting editing of any sort, because they thought their story was so strong they “didn’t need to edit.”

But readers and reviewers have reminded writers all over the world of how distracting manuscripts errors can be, even in e-books. The best story will be abandoned when readers find it too hard to ignore, or be confused by, poor spelling and non-standard punctuation.

As an author myself, I know that when you’re busy writing, it’s practically impossible to see the trees for the forest, so to speak.

Writing is hard work. Editing a manuscript for submission is hard work. But they are not the same kinds of work, and even the best writer finds it difficult, often even impossible, to catch a manuscript’s many possible errors, especially after re-writing and polishing it.

Just what kinds of problems are we talking about? Somewhere along the line, I found a chart depicting the most usual copyediting errors found in writer’s works. (Copyediting is the final editing that looks at a work’s details rather than basic plot, character development, etc.) Unfortunately, I cannot find the attribution for this information, but it generally coincides with our own publishing experience:

Missing words — 35%

Punctuation problems — 24%

Agreement — 15%

Capitalization errors — 11%

Spelling — 6%

Remaining, miscellaneous errors — 9%

We encourage our authors to find good editors and respect constructive feedback of all sorts, at every step of the writing process. This will assist your writing to become ever better, and help to keep your readers’ attention on your story, where it belongs, not on the copyediting details.