These quick steps will help bring your document to professional standards and likely lower your costs of working with an editor.

When you have finished your first draft, it is common for the structure of the manuscript to look like a mess. An editor will work on these first steps, but it will probably cost you a little more money. The steps here will help you get your manuscript ready for your editor and also make a good impression on an agent if you are trying to sell your book to a publishing company.

The Basic Steps

Remove Excess Characters: Your document will likely contain extra spaces, paragraphs, tabs, and other markup that needs to be removed. While many of us has been trained to type a tab at the start of each paragraph and two spaces after the period, these are incorrect to use in the computer age. The computer will make these adjustments. You can head over to the LibreOffice Regular Expressions guide to see how to remove excess markup.

Page Breaks: Be sure to add page breaks between relevant sections of the book. The Title Page, Copyright Page, and Chapter Section should be separated by page breaks. In fiction, it is common to not separate the chapters with page breaks, though non-fiction generally will. Make sure to put these breaks into the default style before sending to an editor, but you will do the specific breaks and styles later.

First Pass Edits: We didn't cover first pass edits in this video, but I always recommend that people will at least run your manuscript through LanguageTool or ProWritingAid before talking to an editor or agent. This will give your book a good first impression.