The Article Daily

Knowing what to edit can be a challenge and these tips will help. When you have had some distance from your eBook, the first thing you should do is to re-read it from start to finish. When you do, be sure to check the following points:

1. Have you spell checked everything?

2. Have you written for one person throughout?

3. Have you kept things upbeat and positive?

4. Have you included everything that needs to be in there?

5. Have you gone off-topic at all?

These are the main points to consider when you are editing. In truth, if you have read what I have revealed so far in this book and really taken it in, you should find that there won’t be a huge amount of editing to do anyway. Most people think their book will be horrendous, and yet after they have had a couple of days to unwind from the writing process they are usually quite surprised at what they have written! It always seems to be better than they thought it would be.

Watch for certain points though. If you have strayed into an area that really shouldn’t be in there (say for example you’re writing that eBook on saving money on groceries, and you’ve inadvertently added in a section on reducing your costs on your cell phone), then take it out - you can always keep it for your next eBook!

If you find you have become rather less than positive at any stage, make sure you strike that part out, or re-word it so you are looking at the situation from the other side.

This is probably one of the hardest parts of editing. We all end up writing sections or paragraphs that we really like and we are really proud of, and yet sometimes they just don’t fit in with what we had in mind for the book itself.

So what do you do? You take the advice once offered by another writer: “Murder your darlings.”

This has been credited to several famous people over the years, but it is not really important to us who said it. It is more important to remember what they meant. The meaning is simple really; they were simply saying that you should be prepared to get rid of those passages of writing which you particularly like, because they are often found to be self indulgent rather than having any particular use to anyone else.

If you are unsure about any part of what you have written in this respect, simply highlight it and carry on editing your book. You will benefit from going through the book itself two or three times before you publish it, because you will be bound to miss things the first time round that you will catch easily the next time you look.

Scott Boyd is an author of Internet Marketing and Health related Books. See more information about writing, publishing, and selling eBooks at Writing Publishing EBooks.

Or check out my jam packed Write EBooks Blog where you will discover a wealth of free information for a lifelong resource.