Literary agents receive a huge amount of submissions from authors seeking representation. It’s a time-consuming affair. The majority of literary agents are only looking for a couple of new authors every year and don’t need to be given much of an excuse to deliver your manuscript to the slush pile.  A paperclip is sufficient enough reason for some literary agents.

Your manuscript could be the next best seller, but you’ve got to get the literary agents to read it! It’s also very off-putting when you’re reading something littered with errors, having to re-read sentences and paragraphs just to make sense of them. The reader will finally ‘give up’.

Proofreading can be a daunting task. You’ve done the hard work of completing your manuscript and all you want to do now is to get your book published.

Proofreading your own work can be tedious, and the majority of the time not that effective either.  Your brain is already in tune with your writing, after all, it knows what you have written and to some extent will assume that what it reads is correct, even when it’s not.

Okay, so you have a spellchecker on your pc, but it won’t highlight all the errors in your document.

For examples of errors that a spellchecker won’t find, click here.

An experienced proofreader, with those all-important fresh pair of eyes, will find and eliminate the mistakes in your submission package.

For details of the AuthorsDen Proofreading Service, click here.

1. Words that sound the same but have different meanings eg stationery and stationary
2. Where it has been stated that  a character is in his late twenties, but later in the story he’s aged a few years and is now 32
3. Where the spelling of a character’s name (mostly an unusual name) keeps changing
4. Where in one paragraph it is morning, then shortly afterwards it changes to evening
5. Instances where names of characters have been completely changed, for example, Bill becomes Graham
6. At the beginning of a book it is stated that a character is talking on her mobile phone. Towards the end of the story the reader is told that the character is not contactable because she doesn’t have a mobile phone.

Effective proofreading is much more than just spotting typos. All the above examples are real mistakes that our proofreaders have picked up.