Never Alone Publishing is a guide on the side not a sage on the stage, and is designed for the writer who understands that it takes a trusting, dedicated team to publish a book.
Whether you write fiction or nonfiction or children’s, you can trust Never Alone Publishing to walk with you in refining your content so that your story touches your readers’ hearts. Involve me in your characters’ lives and you will invite me into a powerfully engaging story.
Imagine getting your manuscript edited like taking your pet to the groomer. What if your pet rambled through the briars and brush moments before jumping into the car on the way? The groomer is going to find all those little twigs, bits of leaves, and maybe a few spots of sap or gooey substance. And as the pet owner, you may not have seen those things at all because they were covered by every strand of disheveled pet hair.
As writers, we can get too close to our work and miss those pesky errors: misspellings, typos, word usage inconsistencies. To verify our writing is as clean and polished as it can be, we need someone else to read our work, to look for those things we cannot see.
You need to invest in a “second set of eyes.”
That’s right—no matter how confident you are that your manuscript is error-free, there are mistakes in there. It’s the first guarantee in publishing.
The good news is that the kinds of mistakes copyeditors and proofreaders catch are not life threatening. And catching and correcting these errors before you publish your book can make all the difference between a professional book (with a snappy bowtie or hairbow) and one that comes across as amateur (disheveled and rowdy).
As you may be thinking by now, editing a book is a process, it takes time.
As your “second set of eyes,” we will find those pesky errors and query any recommendations for improvement. Our model is one of encouragement, feedback, and support.
Never Alone Publishing offers a full-service publishing package, including developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading, formatting, cover design, and publishing.
If you’re still writing your manuscript or have not worked with a development editor (think pet groomer), I recommend working with a coach or development editor before we work together. If this describes what you need, please reach out to see how we can connect you with someone in our verified network.
Then when your manuscript is ready for copyediting, together, we will navigate the publishing journey, where soon you will be able to hold your very own book in your hands.
On the Never Alone Publishing journey, you will be guided through:
Developmental Editing
Developmental or Content Editing handles the “big picture” details of your manuscript. It’s the dog groomer, checking for appropriate genre structure, story and chapter structure and organization, characterization, plot, dialogue, and theme, sensitivity reader. This editor verifies that your manuscript is completely organized and reads well, that it is believable and meets the readers’ needs.
Copyediting is a review and edit (think bowtie or hairbow after the pet has been groomed) of the following:
- Spelling
- Capitalization
- Grammar
- Usage
- Typos
- Styling
- Hyphenation
- Word and line spacing
- Consistency of terms
- Formatting dialogue, numbers, spacing, headings
Never Alone Publishing edits Word documents using Word’s Track Changes feature, which shows the edits in redline markup and can be navigated easily for approving changes. If you’re scratching your head about this, never fear. Training is available.
Typesetting is designed to bring your manuscript into how the published product will look.
Typically this will be done in Microsoft Word or InDesign. The pages will be typeset according to the book’s trim size (how you want your published book to look).
Each line and word will be formatted so that the inside of your book will look like it came right off the bookstore shelf. We will then share a final proof copy with you for review, and we will also proofread the typeset file, which is described next.
Proofreading is the last step (think straightening that bowtie or hairbow) before publishing.
It’s a final, intense review to catch all those stray errors, including: spelling, capitalization, grammar, punctuation, usage, typos, formatting issues.
This step shows anywhere between 1 and 100 minor errors, which is typical for every book that is published.
Publishing services where your book is either printed hard copy or online, or both.
- Formatting
- Print on Demand (POD)
- eBook (reflowable)
- Uploading
- Amazon KDP
- IngramSpark
- Draft2Digital (D2D)
Genres I love to work with:
- Cozy mystery
- Clean mystery
- Children’s
- Memoir
- Devotionals
- Historical fiction
- Science fiction
And when your first book is published, I look forward to hearing, “This is my second book. What do you think?”
Photo Cred: Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash