Are you fed up with your 404 page? Worried that your clients are too? Broken links are broken conversations. Here’s a wee idea I came up with to fix the disappointment and get you and your visitors talking again … using a chatbot.

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​What is a 404 page?
A 404 page is where your visitor ends up if they’ve clicked on a link to your website and one of the following has occurred:

• The URL is correct but you’ve deleted or moved the page to which it relates
• The page on your website is intact but the URL linking to it has been mistyped or edited

Google’s recommendations for a high-quality 404 page

• Use friendly language that doesn’t blame the visitor and acknowledges there’s a problem
• Ensure the page is branded in a way that matches the rest of your site
• Ensure your visitors can see how to get to your home page
• Consider offering links to your most popular pages or content
• Help readers to report a problem

404 frustrations
When you hit a 404 page on a website, you feel frustrated. You’ve gone to that site for a reason – you’re trying to solve a problem, or learn something new, perhaps even buy a service or product.

And if the page you’re searching for has been moved, or if the link you’ve clicked is incorrect, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. It’s a dead end.

If the website’s owner has been thoughtful, there’ll be a search box or menu to help you, perhaps a list of links that might be useful.

Still, you’re the one who has to do the work to get back on the right path because, usually, there isn’t is a way of talking to the owner, a way of saying, ‘I wanted X but I’m stuck. Can you help?’
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And since you’re already in a grumpy mood, you’re more likely to disengage and leave the site. After all, someone else is probably solving your problem, and maybe if you head back to Google Search, you’ll find a fix rather than a 404.

A beautiful bot! Introducing Lulu …
I’m a fiction copyeditor and proofreader and I love marketing my business! I regularly publish free booklets, PDFs, checklists and templates for fellow editors and proofreaders, and self-publishing authors. I share news about that content via social media and on my blog.

A few weeks ago, I set up a free account with ManyChat. I created Lulu, my Messenger bot. She’s my digital assistant and she’s great – most of the time! We’ve had a few glitches … some digital napping on the job … but in the main she’s successfully helped me deliver my resources to my Facebook network. Instantly.

I learned how to build Lulu from my two favourite pro content marketers Andrew and Pete. August was their ‘Build Your Bot Month’ and four in-depth tutorials taught me everything I needed to know to get going.

If you want a taster, hop over to YouTube and watch ‘Get Started Using Messenger Bots in Your Marketing with Andrew and Pete’.

All well and good. But was there other ways I could use Lulu to help me engage with my community of editors and authors meaningfully?

Recently, I was looking for something online. It took a while to find what I wanted, but find it I did. Or nearly. The link looked good but landing was a disappointment – a 404. The site was busy and I had no clue where to start. So I did what a lot of people do online. I gave up and went somewhere more interesting instead.
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That’s not what I want people doing on my site. I want my authors and colleagues to feel that I’m there for them, ready to help, ready to engage. Could Lulu help?

The ManyChat webpage widget
I decided to get Lulu on the case of my 404 page.

I have a lot of content on my website, and even more external links to that content. I’ve been blogging regularly since 2011, and I’ve changed things around on my site more times than I care to mention. And while I do my best to set up 301 redirects when I make changes, there’s no doubt that there are external broken links about which I can do little.

ManyChat has a bunch of growth tools including two embeddable widgets. One is an opt-in box that can be placed anywhere on a website.

I’ve used this widget to provide a more interactive experience for my 404 arrivals, one that enables them to make choices with the click of a button, but ultimately to say, ‘Louise, I wanted X but I’m stuck. Can you help?’

Because they’re contacting me via Messenger, they can get in touch instantly. Which means I can help them quickly. And the quicker I help, the less likely they are to get the hump and go somewhere more interesting instead.
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What’s great about this widget is the customization element. You can choose colours, images and messages that reflect your clients’ needs and your solutions.

It matters not whether you're an editor like me, or an author, or another type of business owner ... the widget will work for anyone with a website.

Case study: the visitor journey on my 404 page
Now that I’ve set up Lulu, the visitor who lands on my 404 page can take a journey, one that involves the ability to interact directly with me quickly. Here’s what it looks like ...

This is what the visitor sees when they land:

Clicking on the button takes them to a new page:

​Now the conversation beings in Messenger. First, Lulu introduces herself and asks the visitor to provide some information that will determine how the interaction proceeds:

In this example, the visitor has selected ‘Author’. This generates a new set of choices, including the option to have a conversation with me:

​If the visitor chooses to ask for a quote or get some free resources, they’re taken directly to the relevant pages on my website. If they wish to talk to me, Lulu acknowledges the request with a message:

In the Messages section of my Facebook page I receive a notification that someone wishes to chat. Lulu steps aside and the real conversation with me can begin:

Summing up
The ManyChat widget allows us to work with Google’s recommendations: apologetic, friendly language that acknowledges the problem; colours, language and images that are on-brand; clickable links to key pages and core content; and the ability to report the problem directly via an instant conversation.

Landing on a 404 page is a negative experience for the visitor. A chatbot turns that negative experience into an opportunity, one that offers a series of calls to action. By including a discussion in the mix, we can offer one-to-one engagement.

And it’s fun! We’re putting a smile back on a frustrated client’s face, and that can only be a good thing!

Have you used a chatbot for your own 404 page, or as a way of engaging with your clients and colleagues? Let me know in the comments!

Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.

If you're proofreading final designed page proofs, there's more to look out for than the odd typo or double space. Professional proofreaders identify and find solutions to a range of layout problems too.

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Who's this checklist for?
This is for anyone checking final designed page proofs, For example:

• Self-publishing authors preparing for print-on-demand. Use this when working through the PDF generated by the likes of CreateSpace or Bookbaby
• Business owners producing PDF or printed reports, booklets, manuals or ebooks. Use this to check your file before it's distributed to your clients or uploaded to your website
• Professional proofreaders. Use this to check page proofs for your publisher clients and independent authors.

​I've proofread over 500 books for the mainstream publishing industry. The checklist below is based on the house guidelines provided by the publishers I've worked for.

The titles I've proofread include social science textbooks, handbooks and monographs, and works of fiction and narrative non-fiction. And while the subject matter has varied, the requirements for checking final page proofs hasn't. 

Note my use of the term 'final designed page proofs'. This checklist is not for those doing a final quality-control check in a Word document. Rather, we're dealing with a typeset PDF or hardcopy of the book as it will appear when printed or published online.

For that reason, the proofreader is tasked with ensuring that the appearance of the book is consistent and correct according to client preference. This PDF provides a summary of the required checks. Click on the image to download your free copy.

Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.

​Ever wondered how a professional book index is created? My colleague Vanessa Wells offers an honest and humorous glimpse into the world of a pro indexer – the challenges and the joys, and the 'sense of having created a beautiful thing'.

Let's take a peek into Vanessa's diary ...

I attended the Canadian national indexing conference in Montreal, where we – like most conference attendees – go to strengthen connections with colleagues and expand our professional knowledge. Since the indexing community in Canada is very small, this is a valuable investment and full of good people.

As a result of the conference, I’ve received a referral and am being hired by a university professor to write an index for a 220K-word anthology he’s editing with 22 chapters and almost as many contributors. It’s a ‘straightforward’ index of ‘names and titles’ which, of course, means that it’s both a name and subject index in reality. Yikes.

Against my usual policy, I agree to meet the professor in person, as the campus is close by and it would be faster than exchanging several emails. An excellent meeting results in ironing out expectations, discussing needs and agreeing we’re on the same page! It’s due July 26.

I send him my contract to review, and we discuss rates. Rate structure, I find from speaking to other indexers, is variable. Some people will work for $2/page; others charge much more. A figure I often hear is $5/page, but that definitely depends on your market – geographically and by genre, specialization, and timeline.

​An independent author writing a non-fiction trade book is not going to generate the same fee as a university-paid gig. Some indexers provide other means of calculating their fees, such as a flat project fee.

I tell him my academic rate, and he agrees. I submit my invoice for a non-refundable 30% deposit, payable before work begins.

Proofs are due. They don’t arrive. They’re rescheduled by publisher for the 30th … While publishing timelines are often shifting (there’s a domino effect when a hitch arises), the end deadlines of proofreading and indexing are rarely budged.

​So now I have to recalculate the number of hours and pages per day I’ll have to complete to meet the non-budging due date of July 26. Four days lost means Goodbye, weekends! for the duration.

It’s a long weekend here for #Canada150, our sesquicentenary. I’m so wiped from the previous month of conferences and making a second website for the new arm of my business that I take (most of) the weekend off. I can’t afford to get sick during this project. Self-care and all that.

Forgot I start a weekly course on Tuesday afternoons for the summer, with an appointment this morning. Will have to start tomorrow. Now that I’ve lost another 5 days, I’ll have not only to work weekends but very long days, everyday. My bad.

21 days to go: I begin the pre-read (see above photo) to start gathering my thoughts on how I’ll approach this behemoth. And I need at least 3 days at the end to edit the written index, so really I only have 18 days available.
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I note there are A LOT of errors still in the MS. I judiciously email AU to double check that it’s been edited and that no other file is forthcoming. He confirms it has been copyedited … Sigh.

Re-install my $500USD indexing software on my new PC. Pay $39 for TextExpander, which is an online tool that lets you build a library of ‘snippets’, sort of like hot keys or macros, but it’s much simpler and faster. Using TextExpander for repeated, long index headings is making my life so much easier: it works pretty well with .ucdx files!

I’m already 50 pages behind. Indexing academic books is so much harder because you have to interpret the often-verbose language to get to the ideas (then re-edit them in your mind) and THEN start forming index relationships between the ideas on that and every other page.

​Since there are almost two dozen authors in this anthology, I’m doing a lot of mental shifts. Why do I pine for indexes so much when they can be so draining?!?

I’m being foiled by the very poor copyediting that was(n’t) done. I email the author-editor several times regarding his preferences for word options that I’m finding in the errata …

​Working on a Saturday is particularly annoying when you hear other people having a great day off. Such is the freelance life.

Here’s how I start an indexing day. Wish I had more than one monitor and can’t believe I used to do this on a 15-inch one!

CINDEX software file open; Google to check MS info, with related sites and academic books on the subject; book PDF marked up with terms needing indexing; and TextExpander to cut down on keyboard strokes. For the time being, I just type the entries into the index; refining connections comes later.

I emailed the author again about the serious issues around the practically non-existent copyediting of this book. It’s causing me to complete about 3pg/hr instead of 5–10pg/hr, never mind that I’m not being paid to correct such things, so again my budgeted time has to be rethought.

He’d like errata forwarded to him so he can take the examples to the publisher and complain. (Understandably, he just doesn’t realize how much is involved in corrections before indexing can be done: research, confirm which instance is the error, note error, find other instances of it in MS, return to indexing the term and fixing all related cross-references).

Ctl+F is my BFF. Wish I still drank alcohol.
​
And for all you fellow CCLs, here’s what’s behind it all (because this, after all, is what’s important in life, not crying over indexes).

I had a good phone chat with the author about the terrible editing. (Again breaking the rules; normally I never share my number – learned the hard way with an abusive client once – but there’s too much to discuss via email.)

We’re hatching a plan to shame the publisher into redoing the copyediting or letting me do it. Either way, my schedule is messed up, and he’s sympathetic. What he’s told me about their process with him this far is appalling.

Email from author: basically, the publisher will redo the copyediting after indexing (!!!). This is a problem because it can affect pagination, thus rendering entries incorrect. I asked that my name not be included due to peer reviews in a trade journal, and I wouldn’t want residual index errors to be ascribed to me. The prof was cool with this; I am not, but that’s life in publishing.

Slogging away, only getting about 35 pages/day done. Have to step it up to get in an extra day for editing the index. I hired a subcontractor to proofread it the day before it’s due. I need an emoji for dollar bills flying away. [Note from Louise: I've obliged.]

Tenth day. Just shoot me.

I’ve put in 12 hours today. I’m starting to wonder if I’m going too deep with this index. Re-evaluating.

Good thing I hate summer weather. I worked smarter today, however, using more automations.

Panic time. I’m only at pg 385 out of 557 and I have less than 4 indexing days left before I start editing.

Trying a new – and, to me, risky – tactic: indexing on the fly, not marking up first. I’ll see how one chapter goes. I’ve got to save time!
​
I’ve subcontracted out a small job (1–2 hrs) due to the copyedit snafu. I need every hour I can get. I figure it’ll be worth the money.

What happened to yesterday? Feel like I’m getting sick, which would be disastrous. As an editor, I can always subcontract out a project for an emergency, but not only does indexing have a smaller pool of trained professionals, the intricacies of indexing style are so individual that really no one could easily or seamlessly take over. At least, not if the index is to retain its integrity and essence. Sigh.

Yay, I’m not sick! Done the inputting of entries! 6,388 records, which is on par for a book of this size and topic. The hard part is yet to come: finessing the cross-references and making links to interrelated concepts. While the software can help check for bad references and missing locators, there are many variables to consider. Some cross-references will have to be truncated and reworked; others will simply have to go; and yet others will require double posting due to wording.

This is the part that indexers must educate authors and publishers about – explaining that Word’s ‘indexing’ program just cannot replace a trained human brain. Word creates a concordance: that’s like taking the ingredients off a cereal box and listing them in alphabetical order.

An index, analogously, takes the main words, interrelates them, looks at their nutrient values and considers how the ingredients work to give us a food product, but we can also just know what’s in there if that’s all we need.

In fact, there’s our professional comparison: indexers are the food chemists of the book world – ta da!
​
This stage is exciting and a bit terrifying. I read an article in our UK journal, The Indexer, wherein another indexer (Margie Towery, Ten Characteristics of Quality Indexes) admitted to having two moments of feeling stuck during the process: getting started and this stage. Glad I’m not the only one!

I’m just doing some basic cleanup so that I can get to the editing described yesterday. Fixing typos deletes erroneously duplicated entries and ensures consistency: now’s the time to go back to the MS and confirm correct spellings; get rid of unnecessary, duplicated or differently phrased duplicate subheadings (the latter because you don’t see repeats in the Draft Format that you might have entered previously); add subheadings for entries that have too many unrelated locators, etc.
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It’s 11 a.m. and I’m only at the Cs. As the meteorologist at the beginning of Twister says, ‘This is going to be a long day’…

Finished cleanup from the Ms to Z; also a lot of double-checking that sufficient entries existed for major and meta topics, as well as the book’s contributors, which the author-editor requested. I’ve planned out the editing for tomorrow before a review by software on Monday.
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And to prevent potential meltdowns, I save every 30 minutes or so, and back up to hard drive and Dropbox every 4 hours. That’s because once someone turned off the fuse box, and I lost a huge part of an index I had been working on. Live and learn.

Sunday morning, so starting late at 10 a.m. I had a good night’s sleep, which is great because today’s to-do list is intimidating … Except my optical mouse isn’t working, so thank god I have a wired spare. Kind of like giving a chef a loaner knife they’re not used to.

The mouse worked after a reboot, but the reboot took about 20 mins, so essentially I’m half an hour behind again.
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I can’t just Control + F terms in the PDF, type the page numbers in and I’m done: half of them are in citations, references or footnotes, and the latter should usually only be included when they’re substantive (which can take some time to decide). So whittling down the number is time-consuming. Then they have to be organized by thought. Then entered, and without page-number errors.

Butterflies. I heard a reminder on the radio yesterday talking about how, philosophically, Good Enough should be good enough, i.e. that striving for perfection is not good for us. I don’t think this is the inclination of the indexer (or editor or proofreader for that matter), no matter who says it. But I’m sure Annie Lamott would tell us to be gentler with our sorry-ass selves.

I confirmed that the proofreader is available to complete their part tomorrow. On to my penultimate review …

Due to other commitments, I had to forget about the index today and trust it would be well proofread by my subcontractor. Not easy to do ...

Bad dreams all night about repeatedly calling said subcontractor because the file was late.

Spent several hours correcting, finessing, re-sorting (getting the locator order right – Roman numerals, ascending page numbers interspersed with those with an i for illustration (sometimes we just put illustrated page numbers in italics), so it would show thus: ix–x, 132, i234, 496), and double-checking things before putting it in a double-columned .rtf file.

I’ve heard that before this editing stage, an error rate for page numbers of about 10% can occur, but with the ones my subcontractor found, I was at 0.002% errors: I hope that’s true! Corrected, I hope it’s near-perfect.

Even human indexers with software can make mistakes. In a book of 220K words to be considered for indexing, perfection cannot be expected.
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I’ve clicked Send …

Anti-climax: the author couldn’t access the file properly (the .rtf was showing up strangely), so he just asked for a new file format. He hadn’t got past the first 10 lines. But he did thank me for my ‘copious explanatory notes’, i.e. my return-file letter, which outlined info about the parameters of the index and changes that had to be used.

The prof is going to read the index this weekend, as he’s travelling. I could have had extra days after all! Waah!

Author got back to me with a few queries and the following: ‘Thanks for the painstaking and thorough job – it’s clear you took a lot of care, and I appreciate that … Thanks again for all of your hard work.’

Hopefully he’ll call me again in the future or refer a colleague to me. But after a few days’ reflection and relaxation, I’m not sure I’ll accept such a long and dense manuscript again – unless it truly is strictly names and titles!

And I’ve realized that an index you’ve written is more like your baby than a book edit: there’s the same pride of accomplishment, but there’s more of a sense of having created a beautiful thing.
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And the labour and delivery stories are way better!

Vanessa Wells is a subtitle, caption and copyeditor, proofreader and indexer, who taught Latin for almost 20 years before becoming a freelance editor. She recently wrote an article summarizing the current state of indexing. When she’s not working, she’s either reading, watching films, or cat-sitting for senior cats with special medical needs. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
www.reelwords.ca  www.wellsreadediting.ca

How to organize your best proofreading and editing resources so that they're visible and usable ...

Content hubs for proofreaders and editors
The ‘self-publishers’ page on my site is a content hub. I call it Louise's Writing Library. It’s where potential author clients can find lots of resources to make their lives easier.

Each resource has a picture. Clicking on that picture takes the visitor to a blog post, a Word file or a PDF booklet (though it could just as easily link to a video, podcast or Excel spreadsheet).

All of that stuff is on my blog too, so why did I create a dedicated page to curate it? Here are 8 reasons why:

1. Hubs help your visitors find your useful stuff
It's much easier for a visitor to navigate from one resource to another when you offer clearly titled images in one place than it is to find what you want in a search bar or blog archive.

And if they get distracted, it’s easy to start the content review process all over again back in the hub. That might not be so easy if they’re on a 7-year-old blog with several hundred articles on it, especially if the ones they want to read appear in different subject- or month-archives.

Your visitor can also bookmark a hub page on your site. They can’t do that with a list of results generated by your search bar. They can probably bookmark an archive, but that will only show the first article or two on your blog, not a chunk of your core resources at a glance.

2. Hubs keeps your visitors on your site for longer because there’s more to engage with
The more goodies you offer visitors, the greater their engagement. That’s good for obvious reasons – you’re helping your clients, showing them you’re engaged with their problems and are willing and able to solve them.

But there’s another important reason. The longer someone sticks around on your site, the more likely they are to hire your editorial services.

It’s no surprise, really – I don’t stick around in a high-street shop, desperately trying to find that one thing I want, if the overall feel of the place and the products it’s selling don’t feel like me. But if I keep finding things that grab my attention, I’m much more likely to walk out of the door with a bag full of something nice.

Editorial websites are no different. If your hub makes potential clients drool because you’re offering them a lot of free, helpful, valuable content, if it makes them feel that you get them, and that you’re a good fit for each other, you have a much higher chance of persuading that person to ask for a quote or a sample edit/proofread.

3. Hubs reinforce your brand
Content hubs are perfect for reinforcing your brand identity because you can create a uniform look and feel by theming your images with consistent colourways, fonts, and design.

Include a few lines of text at the top to explain who your resources are for, and what problems they’ll solve – your mission, so to speak.
​
Here’s a partial sample of the images in my own content hub:

My brand identity is premised on a passionate support for the independent author’s right to write, and my empathy with their self-publishing journey (having done it myself). I hope my smiling headshots give them an inkling of my friendliness and supportive nature. I hope that the colours are soft and gentle enough to inspire reassurance. But just in case, I include the following text to explain what my aim is with this hub:

​And here's a partial shot of John Espirian's Learning Zone. John's hub has a very different feel to it, and so it should. His brand identity is built around a different set of skills, services and target clients.

​4. Hubs demonstrate your expertise and arouse clients’ emotions
With a hub you can offer a chunk of accessible information that solves multiple problems. That presents you as an expert who sees the big picture. It’s not a labyrinthine process of discovery that involves extensive scrolling or putting the right keywords into a search box. Rather, you hit them in the heart with a message that you’re on their side and have their backs.

It’s about arousing powerful emotions. In episode 3 of Content Mavericks, pro content marketers Andrew and Pete argue that high-arousal messages like awe, excitement, relief, and love are much more likely to generate engagement than lower-arousal messages like contentment. ‘When we care we share … Figure out a way to make people care about your message or your offering.’

If your hub can generate excitement in your potential client – make them feel that they’ve found an editor or proofreader who’s completely on their wavelength, someone who’s demonstrably in touch with their struggles, and is offering resolution – that’s a powerful message.

And it’s one that’s more likely to get your visitors telling others about who you are and what you’re up to, and have them clicking the Contact button.
​
5. Eye candy
I cherish my blog, The Proofreader’s Parlour. I’ve lovingly filled it with articles on a weekly (mostly) basis since 2011. But things can get messy. There’s a sidebar with a subscription button, an RSS button, a search box, an archive by subject area, an archive by date, some links to my book, and more.

Plus, I love to write meaty posts. Most of my articles are at least 1,500 words long. And while I do include images and header stamps that summarize what’s included in each post, there’s an awful lot of text.

That’s not all. There’s a lot of scrolling to do if someone wants to glimpse what’s available on one page of the blog. A content hub is much easier on the eye and allows my author visitors to see at a glance what’s on offer.

6. Segmentation
Back in the day when I worked exclusively for publishers, my blog posts were aimed at my colleagues. These days I work pretty much exclusively for indie authors, and now I’m creating content for them, too. So I have two audiences, and two types of content. It’s about a 50–50 split.

Creating resource hubs helps me to segment my website so that the right people can find the relevant content. This is particularly important for my author audience because most of them don’t yet know me. They’re less likely to bounce around in my blog, diving from one archive to another in a bid to find what they need.

Many of my colleague visitors do know me, at least in an online capacity. And so they have a little more patience because I’ve already built a trusting relationship with them. They’re more likely to spend time rooting around the Parlour for what they want. I do have a Resources page for them, but it houses fewer pieces of content than the author content hub.

7. You can show off what you’ve got planned
This is one of the biggest pulls for me. I want potential author clients to see what I’m already offering them, of course, but I have a tonne of great stuff in my head or listed on my content-audit spreadsheet, in production, out with the proofreader, or already scheduled for publication sometime in the next few months. And that’s not visible on my blog.

My blog only tells people about what’s available. What’s coming might be equally appealing to a client. They might be more likely to sign up for membership to Louise’s Writing Library (my author newsletter) if they can see there are some exciting things in the pipeline.

Furthermore, I encourage library members to tell me what’s missing from the hub. If I’m asked for something, but I know it’s going to take me a few weeks to produce that new resource, I want to have a way of indicating that it’s on its way and that I haven’t ignored the request.

8. Hubs encourage ‘you’re worth it’ moments
Certainly, a great content hub will increase the likelihood that your visitor will hit the contact button, but not everyone will be ready to make that commitment.

That’s why building a mailing list is a great way to keep in touch with potential clients who are thinking, ‘I’m interested in you and like what you’re doing, but I’m not quite at the point where I’m ready to hire you as my editor or proofreader.’

Still, it seems like everyone and their aunt has a mailing list or newsletter these days. And if you’re going to persuade someone to allow yet another email into their already crowded inbox, and make them want to actually open it, displaying a hub of gorgeous resources might just be the tipping point – the thing that makes them think you’re worth it.
​
Make sure your hub includes a way of signing up to your mailing list, and a clear call to action that tells the visitor what you want them to do, and why. Here’s what mine looks like:​

Summing up
Make your wonderful editorial content easy to access. Whether it’s a blog, a vlog, a podcast, or something else, help your potential clients navigate their way around your resources and show them all the marvellous stuff on offer.

Tell them who and what it’s for – how it helps, which problems it solves. Explain whether it’s available instantly or whether some sort of access sign-up is required.

​Finally, make sure it’s designed uniformly (Canva is your free friend – trust me!) so that each resource looks like it’s part of a stable. That way it’s not a hotchpotch of stuff; it’s valuable, client-focused content that represents you, your editorial business, your professional values, and your mission – your brand identity.

Resources

• Canva: free graphic-design tool website
• Andrew and Pete: pro content marketers; creators of the Content Mavericks training programme, available to Atomic members
• There are some good examples of content hubs curated by non-editing businesses on the Kissmetrics blog

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.

Another email from a Parlour reader ... the answer will be of interest to anyone with similar manual dexterity issues and who is considering a career as an proofreader ...

Rachel asks:

‘I am looking into a career in proofreading. I have multiple sclerosis and need to work from home. I was wondering if you know whether any of the online courses cover the use of things such as Track Changes. Unfortunately, I have lost almost all manual dexterity and am unable to mark up on hard copy. I am, however, able to use a keyboard and mouse comfortably.’

Thanks so much for your question, Rachel.

So the good news is that because you can use a keyboard and mouse, and you therefore prefer to work onscreen, professional proofreading is certainly a viable option for you (assuming your spelling, grammar, and punctuation are up to scratch, and you're ready to market your business effectively).

Furthermore, there are industry-recognized training courses and resources that will support your onscreen learning.

One thing we need to look at is how different client types’ expectations of what proofreading entails present challenges for you.

It’s important to me that you’re forewarned about this so that you can target your clients appropriately, and communicate your service offering in a way that makes it clear what you will and won’t do.

I’ll tackle that issue first and then move on to the training options available.

Proofreading – expectations and possible challenges
So, you’ve told me that your MS affects your manual dexterity, but my first thought was whether it also leads to fatigue. You didn’t mention this in your email, but I think it’s worth discussing for reasons that I hope will become clear.

In my first decade of proofreading practice, almost all of my clients were mainstream publishers. Now I work exclusively with self-publishers (a few businesses but primarily writers of fiction).

What’s clear from my experience is that the expectations of what has to be done and how it has to be done often differ depending on client type.

Furthermore, how much will be done by the proofreader is often (though not always) quite different.

What and how much does a proofreader do? Traditional publishers
When working for traditional publishers, a proofreader is usually annotating designed page proofs. These are the pages (either paper or digital) that are almost identical to what readers would see if they pulled a book off the shelf.

It’s a quality-control check of a book that’s been through developmental-, line- and copy-editing. The author has reviewed the files at each stage. Once the team is happy that the book’s ready to be laid out, an interior designer or typesetter will format the book to professional, industry-recognized standards.

The proofreader’s job is to find anything missed during an extensive copy-edit, that no errors have been introduced at design stage, and that the various elements of the book are rendered consistently, correctly, and according to the design brief.

In this case, the proofreader is looking at more than just spelling, punctuation and grammar. She’s also spotting problems with page numbering, chapter headings, line spacing, paragraph indentation, running heads, image captions, table and figure numbering, widows and orphans, page depth, prelims and end matter, and more.

In my experience, because most of the problems in the text have already been attended to during previous rounds of editing, there might be only a few changes that warrant querying or marking up on each page.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but, on the whole, most of a proofreader’s time is spent carefully reading and checking rather than marking up.
That’s important for you because while your hand movement is somewhat impaired, your vision isn’t.

And because you wouldn’t have to make thousands of changes, the strain on your hands wouldn’t be excessive or challenging.

What and how much does a proofreader do? Non-publishers
Outside of the mainstream publishing industry, things become a little more tangled. The role of the proofreader is not nearly so well defined.

It’s not unusual for clients to ask for a service they call ‘proofreading’ but that a traditional publisher would call ‘copy-editing or even ‘line editing’. Here the raw text is amended (or suggested recasts to the text are made using Word’s commenting tool).

Furthermore, it’s not unusual for the so-called proofreader to be the first professional to work on the text.

And that means that the changes made might well run into the thousands. We’re not talking about a few amendments on each page, but hundreds per chapter, perhaps even per several pages.
​
Of course, it does vary, but every change, every query, requires the use of one’s hands. So you need to be aware of the potential impact of this kind of work on your health, and think carefully about how it will affect your hands and your fatigue levels.

I’m not saying that working for non-publishers isn’t an option for you. Rather, you’ll need to take your speed and fatigue levels into account and factor them into the time you assign to complete projects.

If you're working in Word, I suspect that =2K–10K-word business documents, Master’s dissertations, journal articles, short stories, brochures and newsletters won't present you with the same challenges as book-length work of 80K–100K words will.

How does a proofreader mark up? Traditional publishers
Because the proofreader is usually providing a pre-publication quality-control check on designed page proofs, most publishers like the annotations to take the form of industry-recognized proof-correction marks. In the UK, these are BS 5261C:2005.

Any decent professional training course will teach you how to use these appropriately.

Traditionally, these annotations were made on paper but publishers are increasingly providing PDF proofs.

This affords you an opportunity because you can use a keyboard and mouse to annotate the page proofs in a way that mirrors a paper markup. There are a few options, but many proofreaders use a combination of a PDF editor’s (e.g. Adobe Reader DC, Acrobat Pro, or PDF-XChange) onboard comment and markup tools and digital proofreading symbols (custom stamps).

I supply free files of stamps that proofreaders can download and install in the stamp palettes of their PDF editors. These stamps conform to BS 5261C:2005.
 
How does a proofreader mark up? Non-publishers
Because many non-publishers supply Word files, you’ll be working directly in Word and using Track Changes.

You’ll also be able to take advantage of several macro suites and find/replace strings that will improve your efficiency and reduce the strain on your wrists and fingers.

That’s good news for all of us – with or without MS or other manual-dexterity issues – in terms of time, quality and consistency.

Summary of what, how, and how much
So, all in all, it’s worth your taking the time to think about the types of clients you’ll work for, how many changes you might be required to make, how those client types will expect you to mark up, what length the projects will be, how long it will take you to complete the different project types, and how all of those things fit in with your specific health condition.

Professional training
My two recommended online proofreading training providers in the UK are the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and The Publishing Training Centre.

The SfEP has practical online courses on the technical aspects of professional proofreading, a grammar brush-up course, and editing in Word. Of the latter, the SfEP says, ‘It includes chapters on styles and templates, find & replace and wildcards, and macros. Guest chapters have been written by Paul Beverley on FRedit, Daniel Heuman on PerfectIt and Jack Lyon on The Editorium. All chapters contain downloadable study notes, exercises and model answers.’

The PTC offers a grammar course, and its flagship Basic Proofreading course.
Before you sign up, I’d recommend you have a conversation with either or both organizations in order to assure yourself that the course materials are usable in a way that suits your needs.

Additionally, there are numerous free online tutorials and screencasts on how to use Word’s Track Changes, so Google will be your friend here. Search for one that matches your own version of Word.

The most important issue for any professional proofreader is understanding first what to change, and making sure that she and the client are on the same page, figuratively speaking, about what degree of intervention is expected and how it will be rendered.

Online books and resources
Here are some resources that should help you on your journey:

• My favourite punctuation guide is R.L. Trask’s Penguin Guide to Punctuation – straight to the point, lots of easy-to-understand examples, logically organized, and short! If you can manage print, there’s a paperback on Amazon.
• If you need an online version, try this guide by the same author, and available free online via the University of Sussex: Guide to Punctuation.
• New Hart’s Rules online: If you’re a UK library member, you can access the premium version of Oxford Dictionaries, which includes NHR and a number of other excellent online grammar and style resources. I like it because it’s easier to search than the paper version, but you’ll benefit from the fact that you can access its content using a keyboard and mouse. You'll need your library card number.
• The Chicago Manual of Style: There’s a searchable online version of this too. Great for all the same reasons as NHR!
• Jack Lyon’s Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word is brilliant for helping the complete novice learn how to use wildcards to save time when editing/proofreading Word docs. It’s a small book, but, again, if the print version’s going to impede access, then use Google Search. Try, for example, Graham Mayor’s Find and Replace using Wildcards.
• Check out the myriad macros on Jack’s The Editorium, too.
• PerfectIt is a simply gorgeous Word add-in that, in my opinion, is a must-have for any professional editor or proofreader working in Word. There are lots of tutorials on the developer’s website.
• Rich Adin’s EditTools is also popular with non-fiction Word editors and proofreaders.
• ​And let’s not forget the mountain of macros available via Paul Beverley – do check these out; they’re all free!
• Finally, for a tiny but excellent summary of BS 5261C:2005 proof-correction marks, visit the SfEP website. There are freebies online but they’re not always up to date. This is still, for me, the best and cheapest reference guide to the marks. It comes as a sturdy piece of folded card, so I’m hoping it won’t be a challenge for your hands.

I hope this helps you move forward, Rachel, and wish you all the very best in your search for a career that will work for you alongside your MS rather than in opposition to it.

Good luck!

Further reading

• Not all proofreading is the same: Part 1. Working with page proofs (Louise Harnby)
• Not all proofreading is the same: Part 2. Working directly in Word (Louise Harnby)
• PDF Editing – Making the Most of the Stamps Tool​ (Louise Harnby)
• Does Training Matter? What Publishers Say about Proofreading & Editing Courses (Louise Harnby; The Proofreader’s Parlour)
• The Proofreader’s Corner: Page Proofs and the Domino Effect (Louise Harnby; An American Editor)
• Proofreading Practice: Exercises with model answers and commentary, 2nd ed. (contact Margaret Aherne direct)

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.

This question is from Alison, who’s new to proofreading and still completing her professional training with one of the UK's industry-recognized bodies.

‘I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the iPad Pro 12.9" with a stylus as a proofreading tool. I am currently using my MacBook Air.’

That’s a great question, Alison. Here’s my take on the situation:

Broadly speaking, I wouldn’t recommend a tablet as a primary professional proofreading tool because I think you’ll struggle to match the functionality available on a laptop or desktop computer.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use it in your home office to increase your screen real estate – perhaps for fact checking, referring to an onscreen style guide, displaying your online dictionary, or checking emails.

Overall, though, I think there are too many limitations for the pro proofreader. Here are some thoughts …

Proofreading and tangled terminology
Your professional training will distinguish between proofreading (annotating designed pages – page proofs) and copyediting (correcting the raw text).

This distinction will match the expectations of many traditional publishing houses, though not all.

I’ve worked for two publishers in my career whose ‘proofreading’ required me to edit raw text. We might call it a light edit, or a proofedit, or just stop beating about the bush and use the term copyedit!

What we’re talking about here is a quality-control check prior to publication. And it’s done in Word.

In this case, you’ll not be scribbling hieroglyphics on your tablet with your stylus; you’ll be directly amending the file.

iPads and Word files
I have an iPad Air. I love it for email, search, messaging, reading, listening to music and audiobooks, social media and gaming. I also like it for writing – drafting anyway. But I wouldn’t use it as a professional proofreading tool if you paid me (unless you paid me a lot to compensate for how much slower I’m going to be!).

The screen size is still too small for one thing. Now, it’s not necessary to have two mammoth screens, but I like mine! I’m happy to work on my 15” laptop when required, but that’s as low as I’ll go. The more I can fit on a screen the less I have to scroll. And that reduces the strain on my wrist.

There is a lot of functionality in the app, but I just don’t think it’s anywhere near as quick or accessible as when one’s working on a laptop or desktop. Making a decent living from professional proofreading means taking advantage of complementary efficiency and productivity tools wherever possible.

Basics like find/replace, wildcard searches, keyboard shortcuts, and the styles palette should speed you up, not slow you down.

But the biggest downside is what you’ll lose from not being able to run a whole suite of gorgeous macros that will make your life easier and improve the quality of your proofread.

• PerfectIt for iPad. Doesn’t exist.
• StyleWriter for iPad. Doesn’t exist.
• EditTools for iPad. Doesn’t exist.
• Macros for Editors (Paul Beverley) … the iPad version. Doesn’t exist

You get the point!

So, for me, the iPad is not a contender for working in Word. Not for the professional, anyway, for whom quality and efficiency are key.

iPads and PDFs
Whom you’re working for will affect things here.

If you proofread for publishers, you’ll likely be asked to work on designed-for-print page proofs. This presents a number of challenges on a tablet.

Even on a larger tablet like the one you’re considering, you won’t get a clear view of a facing recto and verso. And that means you won’t be able to check quickly for unequal page depths.

Then there are the comment and mark-up tools to consider. A stylus is great if you want to use industry-standard proofreading marks, though it’ll need to be a high-quality stylus with a fine nib if your marks are to conform to BSI 5621C.

I’ve experimented with a stylus and it wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped to annotate a PDF to professional standards. I wasted time ensuring each symbol was clear and neat, whereas if I’d been working on paper or on a laptop using digital BSI stamps, I’d have already moved on to the next annotation. Just something to bear in mind – practice will be essential if you experiment with tablet/stylus markup.

Talking of stamps, you can mark up a PDF on a laptop or desktop (Mac or PC) using digital symbols. I provide a free set (see More Resources below).

I want to mention the search function, too. One of the things I like best about marking up a PDF is the ability to do global searches for repeated errors. And while the search tool is quite neat on a tablet, it doesn’t have the range of functionality that you’d find on a laptop or desktop, particularly if you’re using pro versions of Acrobat or PDF-XChange.

And, yes, the comment and markup tools, and the bookmarking are there in the app, and again quite neat if you’re working on a basic file with very little text for a non-publisher client. But for an 80,000-word book in which you might have to make hundreds of changes, I think you’ll struggle.

Overall, the issue is one of speed. There’s a lot you can do on an iPad but I don’t think tablets in general are designed to let you move efficiently around a designed book page in the way a professional proofreader needs to.

I want to be able to see a double-page spread at a glance. Yes, I’ll need to inspect the text word by word, line by line, but I also want to be able to view the page as a whole, including its running heads, its margin and line spacing, the position of all of the various elements and whether they’re aesthetically pleasing.

I want to be able to bounce around on one page, and back and forth between pages via bookmarks, without keyboards and windows popping up all over the place while I’m working! That just slows me down, and in an age when many mainstream publishers are feeling the pinch and increasing their freelance editing rates only marginally each year, smart proofreading is essential. The more efficient you are, the better the hourly rate you’ll earn.

I recommend you stick with your MacBook Air. My friend and colleague John Espirian concurs:

'My iPad is a wonderful writing platform but I wouldn't use it for editing or proofreading in any professional capacity. A MacBook is going to win hands down on that score. I write all of my blog drafts in Byword on my iPad. I use Apple's Smart Keyboard (see More Resources for a review). 

And unless you're location-independent and need to carry as little as possible, treat yourself to a second screen.

I wish you good luck with your training, Alison!
 
More resources

• Working with two screens (John Espirian)
• Not all proofreading is the same: Part 1. Working with page proofs (Louise Harnby)
• Not all proofreading is the same: Part 2. Working directly in Word (Louise Harnby)
• PDF Editing – Making the Most of the Stamps Tool​ (Louise Harnby)
• iPad Pro Smart Keyboard: first impressions (John Espirian)

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.

Abigail is based in the UK and has been proofreading and editing for around five years. Most of her work thus far has come via existing contacts, personal referrals, and a third-party site.

Until recently, that was sufficient. Consequently, she hasn’t spent any time thinking about a website, marketing, or other forms of outreach. Furthermore, the third-party site has changed the service-fee structure so that the work is no longer as lucrative.

She asks:
‘At the moment, I do a lot of academic work, which I love and would like to continue; I just want to secure it privately rather than through third-party sites. In addition, I would like to move away from website copy, blog posts and more generalised proofreading, and start working with publishers on longer and more interesting projects. However, I don’t know where to start, what’s required, or how to approach them. Many thanks for any guidance you can provide!’

Thanks for your question, Abigail!

So, something else you mentioned in your email to me is that you’re undergoing professional training. I was really pleased to hear this because I think it’s an essential element in the mainstream publishing market.

So, I’m going to focus on the following:

• Why targeting publishers is such a good step
• A quick note on earnings and work stream
• Training for academic publishers – what you need to know
• Where academic publishers search
• Why going direct is still your best bet
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
• Taking academic publishers’ tests
• Asking for testimonials and building a portfolio

Why targeting publishers is such a good step
Publishers are still the preferred client group for many editorial freelancers. There are several reasons for this:

• Publishers do all the project-acquisition work for us, which means we can sit back and allow the work to come to us (if we have enough publishers in our pockets).
• They understand what we do – we don’t have to nail our brand identity in a way that’s becoming increasingly critical if we want to be visible in the search engines! No proofreading or copyediting course will teach you how to build a compelling brand, and doing that is an art in itself! Getting a publisher’s attention requires a strategy that’s skills- and experience-focused.
• The definitions of proofreading, copyediting and developmental editing are homogeneous. You won’t be asked to proofread an academic textbook but expected to sort out the structure. The terminology in the rest of the world is rather more tangled (see the Untangling Proofreading booklet below).

​A quick note on earnings and work stream
There’s a lot of talk in the online international editorial community about publishers and low fees. The situation is not straightforward.

There is no universal fee for copyediting or proofreading. I rarely work for publishers these days, but when I did I was offered proofreading fees from academic presses that worked out as low as £10 per hour and as high as £40 per hour.

It depends on the complexity of the project, the press, the brief, the length, the number of authors, and a ton of other things. After you’ve done a few projects for a publisher, you’ll start to get a sense of how things work and what you can expect to earn on average.

Some publishers will offer you a fee of £X per hour, and a guideline for the number of hours they expect the project to be completed in. Some will offer a flat fee for the job. Some of my colleagues (like Liz Jones: see her excellent post in Further reading, below) have successfully negotiated fees when they encountered scope creep.

With some presses, I found that I could counter what seemed initially to be a less favourable fee by being as efficient as possible.

You’ll also speed up as you become more familiar with a press – their house style, the format of their books, and their preferred professional style manuals and reference systems.

Regardless of their fee structure, they do all the project-acquisition work for you, which means you can sit back and focus on the proofreading and editing rather than worrying that your Google Search rankings aren’t as high as you’d like!

Here are three supplementary booklets: Proofreading for Publishers: Do They Always Pay ‘Low’ Fees?, Editorial Efficiency: Rates, Data Tracking and Digital Tools, and Untangling Proofreading.

​Training for academic publishers – what you need to know
In order to ensure you’re fit for purpose with publishers, ask them which style guides and reference systems they prefer, and take time to familiarize yourself with these manuals. Most presses will provide you with a summary of their preferences.

Your training course should draw attention to the importance of following a brief. Publishers are usually rigid when it comes to scope, and going beyond the brief without querying first could have detrimental consequences.

For example, if you’re training to proofread, you’ll need to practise when to change, when to query and when to leave well enough alone – no in-house editor will thank you for recasting sentences to improve the flow in a proofread.

That’s because: it’s expensive to make extensive changes on page proofs; the pagination could be affected; cross-references might be impacted; and the index could be damaged if it’s being created simultaneously.

Also check that the training course you’re doing is recognized by the UK publishing industry. You won’t go wrong with the following organizations, though they’re by no means the only ones to consider:

• The Publishing Training Centre
• Society for Editors and Proofreaders

Certainly, if you want to proofread for publishers, you’ll need to be familiar with the industry-recognized proof-correction markup language (BS 5261C: 2005). Even if a publisher asks you to proofread on PDF, you might be required (or find it efficient) to use digital versions of these marks.

Where academic publishers search
Some publishers do search for editors and proofreaders. The SfEP’s Directory of Editorial Services is one port of call. Some also attend the SfEP’s annual conference and the London Book Fair, so those two events are worthy networking opportunities to put yourself on the radar of academic presses.

Recently, I was contacted by a publisher via Reedsy. It’s the first time I’ve received a request to quote from a press via this platform, and it was for a fiction title, so I’m not convinced that this would necessarily be a primary channel for you if you want to acquire academic work, but I’m mentioning it just as food for thought.

Why going direct is still your best bet
My top tip for getting in front of publishers is to contact them direct, by email, phone or letter. The reason why many don’t search online for editorial freelancers is simply because they don’t need to.

Build a list of UK academic publishers, then find out the name of the person in charge of hiring – it’s probably someone in the production department – and get in touch with them.

You already have lots of experience, and you’ll have a top-notch training course under your belt. I recommend customizing your CV and cover letter/email for each press so that your portfolio of projects sells you as a perfect fit.

Read Philip Stirups’ article for more top tips (see Further reading).

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
I recommend you build a bank of around ten publishers. If you stick to one or two you could end up in deep water further down the road. If one of those clients were to merge with another, you might fall off the freelance list during the transition. If your other client were to go bust, you’d be scuppered.

Having a larger bank of publishers means you have a safety net.

It’s likely your publisher client base will grow exponentially; each time you acquire a new client you’ll be more likely to impress another. It’s a small world, and many of the in-house staff know each other. That will work in your favour.

Taking academic publishers’ tests
Some publishers will ask you to take a test. There are two articles in the Further reading section that offer excellent overviews of how to approach these: ‘The Business of Editing: Editing Tests’ by Rich Adin, and ‘Test Taking Tips For Editors’ by Cassie Armstrong.
​
Asking for testimonials and building a portfolio
Are you able to ask current academic clients for testimonials? If so, do so – however embarrassing you find it! This kind of social proof won’t on its own get you work, but it’s one way of demonstrating that you’re capable of fulfilling a client’s brief.

I mentioned your portfolio above. If you’ve been in business for five years, chances are you have an amazing project portfolio. Make sure your CV, LinkedIn profile and website reflect your body of completed works. Publishers love to see experience!

I hope that brings you a little clarity, Abigail. Good luck with building your new client base!

Further reading

• ‘Does Training Matter? What Publishers Say about Proofreading & Editing Courses’ (Louise Harnby; The Proofreader’s Parlour)
• ‘Not all proofreading is the same, Part 1’ (Louise Harnby; The Proofreader’s Parlour)
• ‘Not all proofreading is the same, Part 2’ (Louise Harnby; The Proofreader’s Parlour)
• ‘Test Taking Tips For Editors’ (Cassie Armstrong; Morning Star Editing)
• ‘The Business of Editing: Editing Tests’ (Rich Adin; An American Editor)
• ‘The economics of working with publishers’ (Liz Jones; Eat, Sleep, Edit, Repeat)
• ‘The Proofreader’s Corner: Page Proofs and the Domino Effect’ (Louise Harnby; An American Editor)
• ‘Undercover editor: Selecting new editorial freelancers’ (Philip Stirups; The Proofreader’s Parlour)

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

A lot of my self-publishing clients tell me they don’t understand what happens in the mainstream publishing industry’s editorial process. So when I advise them that – if they have the budget – they should do their best to mimic it, they’re in the dark.

How do mainstream publishers produce books?
Today’s post aims to switch on the lights by offering you an overview of the editorial production chain. It should give you a sense of why books take so long to get to market and what some of the costs are (to the publisher and even to the author!).

Every press’s editorial production chain is slightly different but the broad principles apply.

A note on scheduling … and marketing
In the mainstream publishing industry, books are commissioned and scheduled for publication often up to a year and a half in advance, sometimes longer!

That time frame isn’t down to the publisher being busy with other stuff; rather, it’s about giving the relevant team members the necessary time to take the book through a rigorous editing process and carry out a staged prepublication marketing campaign.

TOP TIP: When self-publishing, instead of promoting your book at the eleventh hour, plan and implement your marketing campaign well ahead of launch. That way, you can create a fan base and generate excitement about your novel before it goes to market, even pulling in some pre-order sales.

​3. ​Design #1
When the key members have agreed that the correction stage is complete, the raw-text files are handed over to a typesetter (if the book is to be printed). This is where the first proofs are created.

The typesetter formats the book so that the layout conforms to the agreed house style and is designed so that maximum use of the page space is made. Printing is very expensive so minimizing wasted white space is a key factor in the process. The typesetter needs to balance costs against aesthetics.

4. Proofreading
The production manager sends the first proofs (perhaps a chunk of paper but increasingly a PDF) to the author and the proofreader (usually a freelancer).

Both will check them carefully. The proofreader may be asked to proofread blind or against the original raw-text files worked on by the copyeditor (the latter is much slower). The proofreader’s job is not to make extensive changes, but rather to draw attention to any final spelling, punctuation, grammar, consistency or logic problems missed at earlier rounds of editing or introduced during the typesetting stage.

Every change the proofreader makes or suggests needs to be handled carefully in case it has a knock-on effect on the design, the page count and, consequently, the printing costs.
​
It’s demanding work that requires experience and judgement about when to change and when to leave well enough alone. Some publishers even pass some of these costs back to the author – eek!

5. Final revision: Design #2
Now the proofreader’s corrected file and the author’s version go back to the production manager, who has to collate all the final amendments and instruct the typesetter to make the necessary corrections.

The typesetter creates a revised file and returns it to the production manager for sign-off. 

6. File creation and distribution (print, digital or both)
The final countdown! The production manager works with the typesetter and printer to create the final print book that will be delivered to the relevant distribution channels.

​In the case of e-books, the production manager will commission a digital formatter to create e-Pub files that are compatible with the market’s major e-readers and other digital devices. 

The elusive publishing deal and the editorial process
As you can see, there are a lot of stages and a lot of people involved. And that’s why it takes so long and why it’s so expensive to publish.

It also explains, in part, why writers can find it so hard to get a mainstream publishing deal; if the book bombs, there’s no return on all that investment. 

For publishers, novels that need a lot of work, or that don’t fit neatly into an obvious and currently popular genre, are difficult to sell (the high-street bookshops don’t know where to place them to grab readers’ attention).

Should you mimic the mainstream publishing industry's editorial process?
Mimicry will bring you quality – there’s no doubt about that. It’ll also require a major investment in time and money.

We all have to make difficult choices about what we do to make the things we create the best they can be. But there are limitations. I’m passionate about the independent author’s right to write, and I know that your pockets aren’t bottomless.

I hope this has shed some light on the mainstream publishing process! Until next time …

Can you proofread your own book? Here's my advice on what can be done, and how you can do it. 

Truly, nothing beats a second pair of eyes on a piece of text, short or long. I know this all too well because I’m a professional proofreader and copyeditor, but I also write – books (yup, I've self-published four times), guides, booklets and blog posts.

​And I miss stuff – not because I have a problem with grammar, punctuation or spelling, but because I’m too close to the text. I see my own writing in terms of the ideas I want to convey rather than the text in front of my eyes.

That’s why I hire fellow proofreaders and editors to help make my written materials the best they can be. I don't expect those people to guarantee perfection but I do expect to them to ramp up the quality (and they've never failed me).

Here’s another thing I know – the better shape the file's in, the better the price. Editors and proofreaders are professionals and, though we love what we do, we have bills and mortgages too. So, very broadly speaking, the more intervention needed, the higher the fee.

There are things every writer can do to tidy up a piece of text by themselves, though. I’ve compiled them in one handy resource: The Author’s Proofreading Companion.

The steps in this toolkit won’t replace a rigorous professional developmental edit, line edit/copyedit and final prepublication proofread, but they will help rid your file of some of the nasties!

Here’s what the Companion shows you how to do:

• Remove double spaces
• Remove all rogue spaces at the beginning and end of paragraphs
• Remove double line returns
• Change hyphens used as parentheses to dashes
• Change tabbed paragraph indents to proper line indents (using Word’s ‘Styles’)
• Change a hyphen in a number span
• Find lower-case letters at the beginning of paragraphs
• Find a paragraph that ends with no punctuation
• Find a full point followed by a lower-case letter
• ​Change date styles with wildcard searches
• Run a confusables macro
• Remove unnecessary spaces before or after punctuation

Just click on the image below to get your FREE copy!

Hope it helps! And come back soon for more handy tips and advice designed especially for beginner writers.

​Changing famine into feast ... quickly
I discussed some of the problems of relying on one editorial client back in 2013. The issues I raised then are as valid today as they were four years ago, perhaps even more so given the current economic and political climate (both here in the UK, and elsewhere).

This article revisits the problem and includes an emergency business-promotion plan.

The booklet, SOS editorial marketing strategy: Quick fixes for big emergencies, is free to download. I sincerely hope it helps you if you need some inspiration during tough times.

Why one client isn’t enough 
Having only one client when you’re an editorial business owner is problematic for two reasons:

• you might lose that client
• your reliance on that client’s supply of work could lead to your neglecting what’s in your business’s best interests

The client-losing editor
You can lose clients for reasons completely beyond your control, including:

• they no longer need your services 
• they can no longer afford your services
• your contact moves to pastures new
  It happened to me. One of my primary contacts in a publishing house went on maternity leave in 2012. I noticed her absence – I didn’t work for that press for a year. Fortunately, I had plenty of other clients in my portfolio to ensure this didn’t affect my workflow. It was great when my contact returned to work 12 months later and offered me three novels in one hit, but I’m glad my business wasn’t dependent on her.
• they merge with other organizations
  My first job in publishing was for the UK arm of Williams & Wilkins, a Baltimore-based STM publisher. Prior to 1990, Wolters Kluwer, Lippincott, Raven Press, the medical division of Little Brown, and Plenum were competitors. Over the next decade these would all be subsumed under the WK umbrella – six potential clients gradually became one.

​The client-reliant editor
There are several reasons why you might become reliant on a client:

• you enjoy the work
• you value the experience and portfolio-building opportunities
• the client has a lot of work to offer and is able to keep you busy. That means you don’t have to spend time on marketing – your client is doing all the project-acquisition graft on your behalf. In other words, you’re benefiting from the client’s marketing efforts. This can be appealing to inexperienced marketers.

On paper, those are good reasons to work for a client. However, if it’s your only client, and things turn sour, you have a problem:

• perhaps the work has become more demanding
• maybe the rate of pay, which seemed good enough several years ago, hasn’t risen in line with your own cost of living
• your own circumstances have changed, meaning you need to work fewer hours for the same income

​If you have only one client, you have no choice – nowhere else to shift your focus, no one else with whom to negotiate, no one else from whom you can accept improved pay or working conditions, and no opportunity to phase out the one (now problematic) client on whom you rely.

Emergency marketing strategy
Whether you’ve lost your only supply of work or you’ve fallen into the trap of reliance on a now unsatisfactory client, there is action you can take immediately.

Here’s the free SOS editorial marketing plan I promised. Just click on the image to download.

The work you do … and the work you do to get the work you do
If you’re a freelance editorial pro, you’ll always have two jobs:

1. the work you do
2. the work you do to get the work you do

Pay attention to the latter so that you’re not at the mercy of the former.

It’s essential to protect your future interests by building a portfolio of several clients rather than focusing all your energies on one. If you put all your eggs in one basket and things go pear-shaped, the impact on your editorial business, never mind your emotional wellbeing, could be devastating.

If you’re not facing an emergency, you can afford to spread your business promotion over a longer period and focus on slower-burn activities such as content (value-adding) marketing. But if you are in crisis mode, there is action you can take right now that, with commitment, will generate positive responses.

You’re not a newbie – you have experience and you’ve already proven your ability to acquire a client. That’s a great position to be in, so use it to your advantage!

Good luck!

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

• Simple automatic spellchecking
• Advanced automatic spelling correction
• Using MultiSwitch
• Reference citation checking
• ProperNounAlyse
• HyphenAlyse
• Advanced FRedit use
• Line editing
• Macros for Editors – Summary

I’ve included a link to 'Using MultiSwitch'. From there you can access all the other screencasts and subscribe.

You can download all of Paul's scripts via his book, Macros for Editors.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

​How to increase editing and proofreading income
Taking annual action to increase income from freelance editorial work is simply good business practice.

How to increase editing and proofreading income
Taking annual action to increase income from freelance editorial work is simply good business practice.

​Earnings need to keep up with cost-of-living increases else our editorial businesses could fail. Even if they don't fail, the decline in profitability could have a significant impact on our or lifestyle and well-being.

In this article, I consider a several approaches to increasing editing income and declining lower-paid work. These respect editors' differing circumstances, client bases and business goals.

What we earn is determined by the following:​​

• The fee we consent to when we’re in the position of being made an offer (from, say, a publisher, packager or agency). Here, we’re price-accepters.
• The fee we charge when we’re in the position of making an offer (to, say, an independent author, student or business). Here, we’re price-setters.

Increasing our earnings is not always straightforward, though. You or I might think our desired rate increase is entirely justified (for example, because of inflation). However, what you or I think is not the issue. Any change to a pricing model must consider the client’s response for the simple reason that the client might not be prepared to pay. Remember:

• When we’re price-setters, we’re within our rights to increase our fees. On the flip side, our clients are within their rights to decline the new price and walk away.
• When we’re price-accepters, our clients are within their rights to maintain their current fees (or even decrease them), while we’re within our rights to negotiate or decline the work and walk away.

Decisions about what to set or accept therefore need to be carefully planned.

Avoiding knee-jerk thinking
If a colleague states that they’ve decided to no longer edit for ‘low’ rates, by all means congratulate them on their business decision. Don’t assume, though, that their decision is the same one you should be making. Before you impulsively follow their lead, ask yourself the following questions:

• What do they mean by ‘low’ rates? Is your definition of ‘low’ the same as theirs? You may think £25 an hour for editing is great but your colleague may think it’s unacceptable.
• Do they have a supporting income that enables them to implement their decision immediately with no harm to their lifestyle? Perhaps they have a partner who is the primary breadwinner, or maybe they’re lucky enough to have an independent income from a generous trust fund (we can all dream!). Put another way, your colleague might be able to afford to immediately decline £25 per hour on principle, whereas you’re responsible for all your monthly outgoings and aren’t in a position to bear the risk of earning zero pounds per hour until you have acquired a replacement client.
• Do they have a large and established client base in a sector that is known to be less price-sensitive than the sectors you work in? Perhaps their knowledge and specialist skills put them in the rare position of being able to name their price. You, on the other hand, might work in a more competitive generalist market where you’re easy to replace.
• Is their visibility so high that they’re confident they can replace lost clients with new customers who’ll pay their desired prices? Their marketing strategy is mature, whereas you’re still building your visibility and juggling feast and famine.

In other words, don’t feel compelled to decline work just because your colleagues deem what’s on offer as a bum deal. Their current circumstances might be very different from yours. Not everyone can afford to be unemployed, and the choices available to a mature freelance-business owner may be very different from those on offer to the beginner.

Case study – the price-accepter
When you’re a price-accepter, the process for managing rates is usually one of the following:

1. The flat refusal: the client offers work at a price you deem too low. You decline and walk away. Either you’ve acquired a better-paying replacement or you now have a gap in your schedule and are earning less.
2. The negotiation: the client offers work at a price you deem too low. You negotiate. The outcome could be the rate you want, a rate that’s in the middle ground and that will do until you have alternative work lined up, or a no-budge. If you get the rate you want, great. If you end up in the middle ground or with a no-budge, you’ll have to decide whether to walk away or move to phase-out mode.
3. The phase-out: the client offers work at a price you deem too low. You accept the fee but commit to find a better-paying replacement, at which point you’ll phase out this customer.

In the first five years of owning my editorial business, I was almost exclusively a price-accepter. My main clients were publishers and packagers. Returning to the knee-jerk-avoidance issues:

• I didn’t think in terms of ‘low’ and ‘high’. I thought in terms of experience, testimonials and portfolio generation, all of which I believed would make me more interesting and discoverable further down the line. Price comparisons were interesting but nothing more. They didn’t determine whether I accepted or declined work.
• During this period, my partner earned 60% more than me. We relied on his salary to live – food, mortgage, bills, clothes. My earnings paid for the nice stuff.
• I was completely replaceable in the eyes of my publisher and packager clients. They knew exactly where to go to find equally experienced editorial pros if I declined to work for them.
• My marketing strategy was growing, but I wasn’t so visible that I could decline work from a publisher, safe in the knowledge that the gap in my schedule would be filled with a better-paying client. Saying no meant risking earning zero pounds per hour, which in turn meant less nice stuff!

During that phase, I was a negotiator and a phase-outer. I’d take the work to ensure a full schedule. I gained experience and testimonials, and I expanded my portfolio – all great marketing tools. As I acquired better-paying clients, I phased out the 15-pounder, then the 18-pounder, then the 20-pounder, and so on. It was a gradual process.
​
In 2017, my marketing strategy has paid off. I’m highly visible. I’ve got the experience, the testimonials and the portfolio to make me interesting to enough non-publisher clients that I can decline a price and walk away. I’ve moved from negotiation and phasing-out to responding with a flat refusal.

Case study – the price-setter
When you’re a price-setter, the process for managing rates is usually one of the following:

1. The flat increase: you offer the client a price. If they accept, you do the work. If they decline, you walk. You’re confident you can fill the gap in your schedule, but if you can’t it doesn’t matter because of your particular financial circumstances.
2. The negotiation: you offer the client a price. The client wants to work with you but tries to bring the fee down. If you need to fill the space in your schedule and aren’t confident that you’ll acquire a replacement, you’ll negotiate. The outcome could be a rate you’re still more than happy with, a rate that’s in the middle ground and that will do until you have alternative work lined up, or a no-budge. If you get the rate you want, great. If you end up in the middle ground or with a no-budge, you’ll have to decide whether to walk away or buckle.
3. The phase-in: this is an approach that my colleague Janet MacMillan wisely suggests using for established clients. The fee increase is staggered so that the client has time to adjust. It can be presented as an extended discount that respects the pre-existing relationship. The client views it as valuable because they’re getting a special benefit.

In the first five years of owning my editorial business, I had few clients for whom I set the price, and I was still developing my visibility. If there was space in my schedule, I’d try to fill it by negotiating and offering phased-in fee increases for regular clients.

In 2017, things have changed. I’m a flat-increaser. If the client doesn’t like the fee on offer, no problem. I thank them for their interest and wish them luck. Returning to the knee-jerk-avoidance issues:

• My Proofreading Standard and Proofreading Plus services are particular to my business. The definitions of service provision were created by me and may or may not mirror my colleagues’ services. ‘Low’ and ‘high’ therefore don’t mean much to anyone other than me and my client.
• I still have a partner with a backup income.
• The replaceability issue is sticky. I have a couple of business clients for whom price is not the issue. However, the work is sporadic – certainly not enough to fill my schedule. New indie-author enquirers can easily get comparative quotes so I’m definitely operating in a very competitive environment. With repeat indie clients, there’s an existing relationship based on trust, and satisfaction with my previous work. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m irreplaceable, but I have a value-based advantage when it comes to discussing increased prices.
• I’m highly visible. I get a lot of offers to quote and I turn down a lot of work. If my set price isn’t acceptable to the client, I can walk away, confident that the slot in my schedule will be filled.

As I hope the two examples above show, the approaches we take can vary over time and depend on individual circumstances. There’s no one-size-fits-all response.

Some additional thoughts

• Consider the impact: Taking a flat-refusal or a flat-increase approach might have unpalatable consequences. What will be the impact on your income if you or the client walk away? Can you afford it? If not, a gentler transition will be in order – one that includes negotiation, phasing in or out, and taking a longer-term view of one’s business goals.
• Have a replacement strategy: Rate increases should be founded on a plan for how to replace what you might lose. I prefer to assume the worst – that if I increase the rate there’s a very real chance the client will walk. Being pessimistic means you prepare yourself well ahead via regular marketing that puts you top of mind (or top of Google) for the types of client who’ll pay what you want to earn. We must be visible to those clients who won’t quibble over the price we want to charge or be offered.
• Be analytical: Flat refusals and flat increases should be based on a realistic assessments of the potential financial loss rather than on impulsive reactions to feeling undervalued. For some of us, at certain stages of our careers, it’s better to be underpaid and overwhelmed with work than overpaid but underwhelmed. We all want to be overpaid and overwhelmed but that doesn’t happen just because we decide that’s what we want!
• Be realistic: Don’t underestimate your value, but don’t overestimate it either. Even if you think you put the oo into proofreader, your client might decide they can afford to lose you. That’s not to say you should buckle. Rather, you need to have a plan B – a replacement client who wants a bit of your oo!
• Don’t be a sheep: You’re an independent business owner. Ultimately, you need to work out what to charge, what to accept, when to say yes or no, who to work for and how to be found. Your colleagues can’t do this for you, so they shouldn’t be the primary determiners of whether you take a phased approach or a flat one.
• Don’t take it personally: If you lose a client because you can’t find a mutually acceptable price point, it’s not a slur on your character or your abilities. It’s just business. You have to look after yours, and your clients have to look after theirs. Sometimes a fit just can’t be found.

Managing rates is a journey
Increasing earnings isn’t about knee-jerk reactions. Rather, it’s a journey. Depending on your circumstances, you might handle things one way now, and another way further down the road.

Whether you buckle, negotiate, phase in/out, or make flat-out decisions will be based on your circumstances. There’s no one, true way to do it and there’s no shame in any of those choices as long as they’re done in relation to an analysis of your business needs and goals.

Louise Harnby is a professional fiction proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

I'm delighted to announce the forthcoming launch of a new editorial freelancing tool for February 2017: Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders.

The Primer shows you how to create and deliver value-adding content that embraces engagement with colleagues and clients and enhances your editorial business's visibility.

This 40-page book includes guidance on the following:

• Content marketing in relation to your business goals
• Defining content marketing
• Focusing on value
• Working out what’s useful
• Top of Google, top of mind and being human
• Different types of content marketing
• Underlying principles: value, visibility, memorability, usability, identifiability and credibility
• Content marketing in action: a selection of real-world examples
• How to build great content – including two case studies and a template
• Using visual media – including a quick guide to help you choose the best tool
• When to do content marketing
• Content marketing and other strategies compared

You can read more about it, and register your interest, on the book's dedicated webpage: Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you’re an editor or proofreader who’s never once switched off Track Changes (TC) in the middle of an edit and then forgotten to toggle it back on again, congratulations – you’re a rare creature indeed!

​I’m not rare. I’ve done it several times. If you’re like me, you know that sinking feeling – that you’re going to have to go back to where you stopped tracking and redo the work. I've come close to weeping when this has happened. It’s a waste of  precious, precious time, pure and simple!

​Until recently, my solution consisted of frequently double-checking whether TC was on or off. No big deal, you might think. After all, it’s easy enough to take your eye up to the TC button on the Review tab and see whether it’s greyed out – only a tenth of a second. But those tenths add up.

Furthermore, I’m not billing my clients for my attention to the TC button; I’m billing them for proofreading and editing. I should be focusing on the text, not distracting myself with checking that TC is on.

I could work with ‘All Markup’ (or ‘Final Showing Markup’ in earlier versions of Word) showing, but that’s just another distraction. I want my eyes and brain to focus on what my client has written, not what I’ve amended.

Paul Beverley, naturally, has the solution. It’s a macro called VisibleTrackOff4 and it’s amazing!

Even if you don’t like macros, don’t use macros, are wary of macros, this is one macro that you should consider installing anyway. Trust me. It's a lifesaver.

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to ensure you never forget you’ve switched off Track Changes. I’ll show you the following:

• How it works
• How to install it
• How to run it efficiently
• Alternative versions with different formatting options

How it works 
In brief, VisibleTrackOff4 is an alternative TC on/off switch. You run this macro instead of using Word’s TC button.
​
I work in Windows 10 with Word 2016. On my screen, the TC button is accessible via the ribbon in the Review tab. Your view may be slightly different.

When you use VisibleTrackOff4 (rather than the TC button shown above) to switch on TC, your page appears white, as usual. However, when you use it to switch off TC, your page turns yellow. As you toggle TC on and off, your page colour toggles too. If the page is yellow, you know TC is off. That’s something you can’t miss, and that’s why it’s foolproof.

To use the macro efficiently, you can do one of the following:

• Create a shortcut key
• Add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar
• Create a custom button in your ribbon (Word version 2010 onwards)

I’ll show you how to do all three in the ‘How to run it efficiently’ section below.

How to install it
Here’s how to install the macro:

• Download Paul’s book from his website, Archive Publications
• Open TheMacros.doc
• Search for VisibleTrackOff4
• Select and copy the script, including the title ‘Sub VisibleTrackOff4()’, right down to and including ‘End Sub’
• Open the ‘View’ tab on Word’s ribbon
• Click on the ‘Macros’ button

• A window will open (with the header ‘Macros’). Click on the ‘Step Into’ button
• This will open Visual Basic. In this will be another window (with the header ‘Normal – NewMacros (Code)’. Use the scroll bar on the right to go to the bottom. If you need help installing a macro for the first time, see ‘Another useful proofreading/editing macro: Paul Beverley’s MultiSwitch’
• Click under the last line of text
• Paste the macro script that you copied earlier
• Close Visual Basic using the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner

• Click ‘OK’ if you get the message ‘This command will stop the debugger’

How to run it efficiently
To switch TC on and off efficiently using VisibleTrackOff4, you can do one of the following:

• Create a shortcut key
• Add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar
• Create a custom button in your ribbon (Word version 2010 onwards)

Create a shortcut key

• Right-click anywhere on the ribbon
• Select ‘Customize the Ribbon’, or ‘Customize Quick Access Toolbar’, depending on your software
• Click on the ‘Customize…’ button at the bottom 

• Under ‘Categories’, select ‘Macros’
• Go to the right-hand ‘Macros’ column. Scroll down and select VisibleTrackOff4
• Type in your preferred shortcut key
• Click on the ‘Assign’ button followed by the ‘Close’ button

Add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar

• Right-click anywhere on the ribbon
• Select ‘Customize Quick Access Toolbar’
• From the drop-down ‘Choose commands from:’ box, choose ‘Macros’
• Scroll down to find the macro and click on it
• Click on the ‘Add’ button followed by the ‘OK’ button
  

​This is what your new button will look like:

Create a custom button in your ribbon (Word version 2010 onwards) 

• Right-click anywhere on the ribbon
• Select ‘Customize the Ribbon’
• Look to the right-hand column
• Scroll down and click on ‘Review’
• Click on the subentry ‘Tracking’
• Click the ‘New Group’ button
• Now look to the left-hand column
• From the drop-down ‘Choose commands from:’ box, choose ‘Macros’
• Scroll down to find the macro and click on it to select it
• Go back to the right-hand column and click on ‘New Group (Custom)’
• Click the ‘Add’ button followed by the ‘OK’ button

This is what your new button will look like:

Other versions
You don’t have to go for the yellow-page effect. Paul’s provided other options. The installation and quick-access instructions are the same; only the script you’ll need to copy and paste is different:

• VisibleTrackOff – embossed effect
• VisibleTrackOff2 – blue dotted underline
• VisibleTrackOff3 – wiggly lines
• TrackOnOffAudible – beeps

​
Summing up
I prefer the yellow-page effect because it’s so obvious, and because it doesn’t interfere with my view of the text while I’m amending with TC off.

I also prefer to run the macro with a custom ribbon-based button because it’s right up there alongside Word’s TC button, which is what I’m used to. I’ve created a shortcut key so that I have choice in the matter. This comes in handy when I need regular access to the Styles tab and don’t want to keep switching the tabs on the ribbon.

I urge you to try this macro. Remember, you need never again endure the frustration of having forgotten to switch on Track Changes! 

P.S. My colleague Adrienne Montgomerie was single-handedly responsible for showing me how easy it is to customize the ribbon so that you can easily and quickly access any command. Her article ‘Make a Custom Tab on Word’s Ribbon’ is a must-read if you want to increase your onscreen efficiency.

And, as always, thanks to Paul Beverley for creating some brilliant macros, and for giving me permission to bang on about them via my blog!

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

My Student Proofreading Toolkit includes 17 handy Word find/replace strings and wildcard searches that will help you tidy up your PhD thesis or Master’s dissertation before you hand it over to a third-party professional proofreader or submit it to your university’s assessors.

The toolkit includes:​

• 17 self-editing tasks
• advice on using Word’s ‘Styles’ function
• a brief discussion of stylistic preferences
• links to 17 popular academic style summaries (e.g. CMOS, APA and OSCOLA)
• guidance on choosing a professional proofreader

These DIY tips are designed to complement, not replace, a rigorous proofread. You can polish your document at any stage, but, for the sake of efficiency, I recommend carrying out the tasks after you've finished writing your thesis or dissertation and reviewed its purpose, content and structure.

No advanced technical knowledge is required – even the novice Word user will be able to implement these tasks by following the step-by-step instructions (and associated screenshots). You can even select and copy some of the longer find/replace and wildcard search strings from the PDF.

A word of caution – always save a backup copy of your file first, just in case you implement changes incorrectly. It's easier to revert to a fallback document than to repair a damaged one. I always test complex find/replace and wildcard search strings beforehand.

The self-editing tips I’ve chosen are some of my personal favourites. I hope you find them as useful as I do!

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

Useful editorial software, resources and templates
I've recently expanded my Resources page to provide fellow editors and proofreaders, particularly new entrants to the field, with a one-stop shop for some of the business tools I've created.

• An editorial invoice template (UK version; if you live outside the UK, your tax authority might require the inclusion of different information). The template includes dropdown boxes to speed up invoice-building for regular clients (Excel)
• PDF proofreading stamps
• An editorial accounts-and-scheduling template (Excel)
• An editorial style-sheet template (Word)
• An editorial progressive-pricing-array template (Excel)
• A list of national editing and proofreading societies

Where appropriate, I've included the raw Excel or Word files, rather than PDFs, so that you can amend for your own needs.

Visit the Other Resources page to access the links.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

MultiSwitch is another gem of a macro created by my colleague Paul Beverley.

It’s available in his free book, Computer Tools for Editors.
 
In a nutshell, it allows you to switch around a word (or words) with a single keyboard shortcut. I use it to save time with every single Word-based project I work on.

​So imagine that you’re editing or proofreading a Word file in which the author repeatedly uses ‘which’ for restrictive relative clauses. You want to change it to ‘that’. This means carrying out three small actions: select, delete and retype.

That’s not a problem if the issue occurs twice in a file, but if it occurs tens or hundreds of times, those seconds are going to add up and eat into your hourly rate. And let’s not get started on the ache in your wrist!
 
Naturally, you might notice that a particular job has a number of similar niggles that you want to attend to, in which case this macro will be even more of a productivity-enhancer.

I’m currently working on an 85K+ academic book in Word – multiple authors, some whose first language isn’t English. The publisher is a stickler for the which/that and last/past prescriptions, even though many in the UK are a little more forgiving. There are hundreds of instances, and MultiSwitch is saving me soooo much time!
 
Give it a whirl!

MultiSwitch in action
To run MultiSwitch, you simply place your cursor before or in the word you want to change (in our example here, ‘which’), and hit your keyboard shortcut (I’ve assigned Ctrl Q, but you can choose whatever you like). Then, bingo, the macro amends ‘which’ to ‘that’.

Here's a teeny-tiny video of me using MultiSwitch. This demo aims merely to show you where to place the cursor prior to hitting your assigned shortcut key command, and what you will see on your screen (a little flickering as the macro makes the switch). 

If you don’t know how to assign a keyboard shortcut, don’t worry – I’ll show you how later in the article. 

The beauty of MultiSwitch is that you need only one keyboard shortcut for a ton of different word switches. My list currently includes the following switch options: 

• that – which
• which – that
• last – past
• like – such as
• less – fewer
• Less – Fewer

However, I’ll be adding more as and when I need to. Again, further down, I explain how to create your list – it’s a doddle.

Installing MultiSwitch
Go to Paul’s website and download Computer Tools for Editors.

Save the zipped folder to your computer and extract three files: one is an overview of the macros – what they are, what they do, how to store them and so on – plus all the programs themselves; another contains just the actual macro programs; a third is called ‘Beginners Start Here’; and the final file is a style sheet. The file you need to open in Word is ‘The Macros’.

Use Word’s navigation menu on a Mac (or Ctrl F on a PC) to open the Find function. Type ‘Sub MultiSwitch’ into the search field and hit ‘Return’ twice. That will take you to the start of the relevant script.

Select and copy the script from ‘Sub MultiSwitch()’ down to ‘End Sub’.

Still working in Word, open the ‘View’ tab and click on the ‘Macros’ icon on the ribbon:  

A new window will open.

If you don’t have any macros already loaded:

• Create a test macro that you can delete later.
  
• First, make sure the ‘Normal.dotm’ template is showing in the ‘Macros in:’ box.
  
• Type ‘TEST’ into the ‘Macro name:’ box.
  
• Click on the ‘Create’ button.
  
• Your TEST macro will now show up. From now on, it’ll be easy as pie to add additional macros.
  

If you already have macros loaded (your TEST macro or any other):

• Click on ‘Edit’.

​​
This will open up another window:

• If necessary, use the scroll bar to take you to the bottom of the text.
• Paste the MultiSwitch script at the end, under ‘End Sub’.

Don’t close this Visual Basic window quite yet – there’s something else you need to do first!

Creating your MultiSwitch list
Now head over to Word. Open a new document and call it something meaningful (mine’s called LHSwitchList). 

Create your list using the following style:

that
which

which
that

last
past

like
such as

less
fewer

Less
Fewer

Save it somewhere just as meaningful! (Mine’s in my Macros folder, but you can save it wherever it suits you.) Now close the document.

You can amend this list any time you want to – just add or delete as you see fit.

Changing the MultiSwitch script
Now you're going to make two small amendments to the macro script so that it's personalized for you, so go back to the window into which you pasted the MultiSwitch script.

At the top of the script, you’ll see the following:

Sub MultiSwitch ()
‘ Version 11.05.16
‘ Scripted word/phrase switching

maxWords = 4
listName = “LHSwitchList”
' Set min number of chars for an abbreviation
minChars = 2

myDir = “C:\Users\Louise\Dropbox\Macros\”

The text in red shows how I’ve customized the script to suit my needs – you need to put in your own switch-list file name and location.

Now you can close the window by clicking on the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner. Do the same with the general Visual Basic window too. Don’t worry if you get a message about a debugger – just press ‘OK’.

Creating the keyboard shortcut for running MultiSwitch
If you don't know how to create keyboard shortcuts, this section's for you. If you do know how to do this, you don't need to read any further!

I'm working in Word 2016 on a PC. If you are too, the instructions are as follows:

• In Word, select ‘File’, ‘Options’, ‘Customize Ribbon’ (1). 
• Click on ‘Customize’ (2). A new box will open up entitled ‘Customize Keyboard’.
• In the ‘Categories:’ window (3), scroll down and select ‘Macros’.
• In the ‘Macros’ window (4), select ‘MultiSwitch’.
• Finally, choose your preferred keyboard combination by typing it into the ‘Press New Shortcut Key’ window (5).
• Select ‘Assign’ and ‘Close’.

(If you are working in a different version of Word, see pp. 14–15 of the ‘ComputerTools4Eds’ file in the Macros folder that you've downloaded from Paul’s site in order to install this macro. There, he provides details of the process for different versions of the software.)

The image below shows how I assigned a keyboard shortcut to another macro called ‘UndoHighlight’. The steps are exactly the same.

That's it! I hope this macro saves you as much time as it's saving me!

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

I can't quite fathom how I've curated this blog for so long and never featured The Chicago Manual of Style Online.

Here are just three reasons why I love it:

1. I work with a lot of independent fiction authors. And although I'm based in the UK, around half of my clients live in the USA. CMOS Online is my go-to style guide unless they ask me to use something else.
2. It's sooooo easy to search, and really comprehensive! On the very few occasions that I haven't been able to find the answer I'm looking for in the main directory, the Q&As have come up trumps.
3. At US$35 per year, it's superb value. (Yes, of course I wish it was free, but let's not be greedy!) That's a worthwhile investment because I can justify the stylistic decisions I make to fledgling authors in the knowledge that those choices are industry-recognized. And, anyway, you don't have to stump up the cash immediately; there's a 30-day free trial.

None of the above will be news to readers whose editorial businesses are well established. But if your proofreading or editing business is fairly new, and you're thinking about which style guides to invest in, CMOS Online is definitely one to consider, especially if you want to feel comfortable working with international authors who write fiction and commercial non-fiction.

CMOS Online isn't the only tiger in my tank, of course. New Hart's Rules and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association are two more resources that I often refer to.

There are many other style manuals that a client might ask you to follow, depending on the material and the intended audience. ​Ultimately, what you invest in will be determined by your target clients' preferences.

​Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and the curator of The Proofreader's Parlour. She is also the author of Business Planning for Editorial Freelancers, Marketing Your Editing & Proofreading Business, and Omnibus: Editorial Business Planning & Marketing Plus.

​Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, follow her on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

There have been some interesting discussions about pricing models in the online editorial community recently.

• My colleague John Espirian, a specialist technical writer, prefers per-project fees for long jobs (‘How do technical writers charge?’).
• One of my own specialisms is proofreading for independent fiction authors. I prefer to build my quotations based on a word count.
• Then again, I know copy-editors who prefer to build their quotations based on the total number of hours a project will take.

If you prefer a per-word model, then you may like to consider using a progressive-pricing array formula. It’s not the only way of doing things, certainly, but it’s something I’ve tested and am currently working with. I like this model because it incorporates economies of scale.
 
Before I explain how the progressive-pricing array works, a very quick word on price presentation versus determination.

Price presentation versus determination
Price presentation and determination are two different things.

• How we present our quotations to clients should be determined by what our clients have asked for. If the client has asked for an estimated bottom-line project fee in euros and I respond with a £ per 1,000 words figure, I’m not going to instil confidence in them that I can follow a brief.
• How we determine a price should be based on our own needs and requirements. Once we’ve determined what the price will be, we can present it in the way that our client has requested.

Economies of scale
When a proofreader is working on larger projects, there are economies of scale. I’m currently working with an independent fiction author on nine books (which I’m proofreading over a five-month period).

Most of the projects are between 70,000 and 80,000 words in length; a couple are around the 50,000-word mark; and one is a short story with just over 10,000 words. All of the books feature the same central protagonist and a small cast of supporting characters.
 
The serial nature of the content, the reappearance of key characters, and the concentration of action in predominantly one fictitious location all serve to save me time as I move through each book. This means:

• I don’t have to build a style sheet from scratch.
• The author’s preferences are stable.
• I’m getting to ‘know’ the characters so I spot inconsistencies more quickly and easily as time goes on.
• I’m increasingly familiar with the author’s writing style, so there’s less head-scratching time.

Even so, the average number of words proofread per hour was fewer for the 10K-word short story than for the previous 70K-word novel. And in the first few hours of working on the the 70K-word novel, I proofread fewer words per hour than was the case in the hours that followed.
 
That’s because, even with all the benefits of working on a series, each book still needs a certain amount of ‘stuff’ done to it in its own right:

• Overall layout and consistency checks.
• Wildcard searches and macro runs that help me spot and solve global problems efficiently.
• Plus, of course, the actual word-by-word proofread for grammar, spelling and punctuation issues.

If we take the series element out of the equation, and compare the proofreading of two books in a similar genre for two separate authors, the impact of project length for the proofreader can become even more stark.
 
Consequently, I want to price the 30K-word novella differently from the 100K-word tome. It’s for this reason that while I like to build my quotations on a per-word basis, I don’t want something as straightforward as a £6, £8 or £10 per 1,000 words model. Instead, I want something that respects the economies of scale that come with larger projects. This is where the array comes into its own.

How does a progressive-pricing array formula work?
An array formula can look at a number (a word count, in our case) and then, based on a set of ranges that we’ve provided, price those ranges accordingly. Here’s a very basic example. You might set up your array such that the following are true:

• First 5,000 words are priced at £25 per 1,000 words.
• The next 10,000 words are priced at £10 per 1,000 words.
• The next 20,000 words after that are priced at £7 per 1,000 words.
• The next 50,000 words after that are priced at £6 per 1,000 words.

This would result in the following quotes:

(1) If you were asked to provide a quotation for proofreading a 2,000-word article, the price would be £50 (£25 per 1000 words).

(2) If you were asked to quote for a 10,000-word short story, the price would be £175. This is based on:

• • £25 per 1,000 words for the first 5,000 words (£125)
  • plus £10 per 1,000 words for the remaining 5,000 words (£50)

The average price per 1,000 words works out at £17.50.
 
(3) If you were asked to quote for a 70,000-word book, the price would be £575. This is based on:

• £25 per 1,000 words for the first 5,000 words (£125)
• plus £10 per 1,000 words for the next 10,000 words (£100)
• plus £7 per 1,000 words for the next 20,000 words (£140)
• plus £6 per 1,000 words for the next 35,000 words (£210)

The average price per 1,000 words works out at £8.21 and reflects the economies of scale that the proofreader will be able to benefit from because of the size of the book.

A progressive-pricing array formula in action
I’ll admit that it did take some fiddling to get the actual formula working for me. I used this as my template: ‘Progressive Pricing Formulas For Excel’ (www.cpearson.com). The example given is similar to the setup I wanted for my own quotation tool, and it provides a formula that I was able to tweak for my own data. See also my downloadable sample below.

Here's a screen shot of what a progressive-pricing array formula might look like in Excel.

And here's an Excel template you can download and adapt to suit your own preferences. Note that you'll need to look carefully at, and amend, the array-formula box to ensure that the cell descriptions are correct for your data (that's the fiddly bit!).

One size doesn’t fit all
The usual caveat applies – my way certainly isn’t the best way or the only way! It’s just one approach of several. I wanted to share my experience with you so that if you fancy testing a progressive-pricing array, you have a framework to get you started.

In practice, you might want to build more ranges into your array formula to provide increased flexibility. The numbers I’ve used above are just for illustrative purposes.

I find the array formula useful for ballpark quotations because I want to provide a quick quote based on a word count. Obviously, any professional proofreading project needs to be evaluated on more than just a word count before terms are agreed and confirmed.

Those editorial professionals working with complex projects that require varying levels of intervention might find a progressive-pricing array formula far too limiting. It functions well for me as a proofreader because of the nature of my work. I do, however, have different arrays set up for different client types (e.g. students for whom English is a second language; independent authors whose first language is English) and for different levels of proofreading service. The prices I assign to the various ranges are different in order to reflect the variances in how I work with the text and the speed at which I am able to proofread.

How do you build a price for editorial work?
How do you build your quotations? Per hour, per word, per day, per project? Have you tested different approaches for building your fees? And do you find that different models work better for different types of editorial work?
 
I think that, at the very least, we should test our pricing models. I’ve written about this in more detail on the An American Editor blog: ‘The Proofreader’s Corner: Testing Editorial Pricing Models’.
 
I’m always interested in learning how others go about pricing editorial work so please do leave a comment if you have something to share. 

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

In 2016, I fell in love with PerfectIt all over again, so it’s high time I wrote my own review of the product.

Needless to say, this only scratches the surface – to understand all of the tests and checks that PerfectIt can do for you, you really need to get stuck in and play with it.

I’m not going to use this article to provide an instruction manual for how to use PerfectIt – the developer, Daniel Heuman, has provided plenty of guidance on the Intelligent Editing website and a stack of video tutorials on the Intelligent Editing YouTube channel.

What I will do is highlight the new features that I find most useful when proofreading and copyediting for those clients who want me to work directly in Word. Readers who are specialist copy-editors or who have different client groups may well have different preferences.
​
Disclaimer: I have a PerfectIt licence and am a long-time user of the software. However, the developer has not asked me to write this review, nor have I been remunerated in any way for doing so. The views expressed herein are mine and based solely on my experience of using PerfectIt on a regular basis.

What is it?
For those readers who are not familiar with this software, PerfectIt 3 is a sophisticated consistency checker. By customizing its built-in style sheets, or creating your own, you can define your preferences and let PerfectIt locate variations and possible errors.

Note: PerfectIt is not compatible with Macs. If you’re a Mac user, you’ll need software that specializes in enabling Windows applications to be run on a Mac (e.g. VMware Fusion or Parallels).

What's so brilliant about PerfectIt 3?
There are two reasons why I fell in love all over again.

1. I got better at using Word’s find/replace wildcard search function, thanks primarily to Jack Lyon’s free Advanced Find and Replace for Microsoft Word (an updated and expanded version is available from Amazon for US$9.95: Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word) and chin-wagging with my pals from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders’ local group in Norfolk.
2. Daniel Heuman added some fabulous new or improved features to PerfectIt 3. These enabled me to take what I’d learned about harnessing the power of Word’s wildcard searches and build that into my customization of PerfectIt.

To get the best out of PerfectIt, you must tell it what you want it to do. That does mean launching one of the style sheets and taking the time to look at all the various options (and there are a lot).

In my early days of using PerfectIt, I didn’t do this. The result was that I didn’t get the most out of the software because it was ignoring inconsistencies (or flagging up false positives) that I'd marked as not relevant, when the opposite was true. It isn’t that PerfectIt wasn’t working properly, but rather that I wasn’t.

Here are two examples:

1. In some of the files I work on (e.g. fiction texts), I want to spell out most numbers. Before I started paying serious attention to all the options available for customization in PerfectIt’s Style Sheet Editor, I would run the program and find that it missed a lot. It’s only when I studied the Settings and Fine-tuning tabs in the Style Sheet Editor that I realized why. I was still asking PerfectIt to ignore numerals under certain conditions – conditions that didn’t apply to the type of work I was doing. By customizing the instructions, I was able to enforce my own preference. All those previous misses turned into hits.
2. PerfectIt is a Word add-on. If you can’t get the best out of Word, you won’t get the best out of PerfectIt. Until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t utilizing the Wildcards function in PerfectIt’s Style Sheet Editor. Cannier users of Word will be shocked that I didn’t know how to locate inconsistencies in author/date in-text citations (e.g. (Harnby, 2013) vs (Harnby 2013) using wildcard searching. I could find the problems in Word but I couldn’t automatically fix them – all the replacing was done manually (yeah, I know!). And because I couldn’t do the automatic fix in Word, I couldn’t do the fix in PerfectIt. When I did learn how to do it in Word, I made PerfectIt work harder for me and saved myself a tonne of time.

There’s a developer summary of all the new features and improvements of PerfectIt at ‘What’s new in Version 3’. The following is a brief overview of what I love the most.

Wildcard searches
PerfectIt 3 allows you to harness the power of wildcard searches using exactly the same terms that you’d use in Word. I love this feature because it means I can work more efficiently – I don’t have to run a set of find/replace searches in Word and then go and do a bunch of other stuff in PerfectIt. I can consolidate all my wildcard searches in one place, which saves me time.

Example: one of my clients has a house style that asks for comma separators in four-digit numbers (e.g. 2,999), but fixed spaces in five-digit (and above) numbers, e.g. 12 999 or 112 999. In Word, the wildcard search is:

FIND: ([0-9]{2,3}),([0-9]{3})
REPLACE: \1^s\2

I can add those exact same instructions into a PerfectIt style sheet, customizing it via the Wildcards section in the Style Sheet Editor. Then, every time I use that style sheet, PerfectIt will test for the pattern in red and adjust the comma to a space. Note that you can tell PerfectIt to always use comma separators (or alternative renderings) but the wildcard search comes into its own when your house style asks for inconsistency (as in this example).

As my colleague Sarah Patey wisely pointed out, wildcard searches in Word can be problematic when Track Changes is switched on. Word doesn’t always behave itself! However, PerfectIt seems to handle wildcard searches with TC rather better.

Missing brackets and quotation marks
This is a gem for those of us who work on academic projects with lots of brackets (e.g. author/date citations or quoted matter) and those of us who proofread and edit fiction (e.g. dialogue).

To take advantage of this function, launch PerfectIt, select your preferred style sheet and click on the Tests in the sidebar to activate the dropdown menu. Then select ‘Tests and Options’, choose ‘Formatting’ and make sure that ‘Brackets and Quotes Left Open’ is checked.

Oxford/serial comma
The debate about whether the Oxford comma is useful or unnecessary rumbles on in the world of words. No matter – editors and proofreaders often find themselves instructed by their client to use it or bin it (except where enforcing the preference would lead to a lack of clarity). PerfectIt allows you to set a preference either way – just make sure the test is checked (it’s in the ‘Formatting’ section mentioned above, and that you’ve actually set the preference. To tell PerfectIt what to do, click on ‘Edit Current Style’ on the top ribbon, choose ‘Settings’, scroll down to ‘Oxford (Serial) Commas’ and make your choice.

Italics
If your client has insisted that a particular word is italicized (or not), you’ll love this function. PerfectIt already has a built-in list of words that can be styled, but you can add your own. Here’s a quick example: some clients want [sic], some want [sic] and some don’t care as long as it’s consistent. In ‘Edit Current Style’ on the top ribbon, select ‘Italics’. Then choose an existing word or add your own. You can then tell PerfectIt whether it should be italic, Roman, consistent, or italic at first use only. This is one of those functions that really does save time if you work on lengthy academic texts.

Heading format
Here, again, PerfectIt 3 enables us to harness the power of Word’s styles palette. You can set your preferences for several different heading levels, e.g. sentence case, initial caps on significant words, upper case, or all initial capitals. As with the italics check, this is particularly useful when working on academic books and theses. Additionally, those who regularly work with clients who have a specific house style that explicitly defines how heading levels should be formatted (e.g. journal article editors) will love this too, regardless of the length of each individual project they’re working on.

Dashes and non-breaking spaces
These searches are my final wow tools! If, like me, you regularly work on documents riddled with hyphens that should be spaced en dashes or closed-up em dashes, or you want to ensure that all those space-separated numbers and measurements are not going to end up falling over the cliff, you’ll adore this function. Again, these are issues that can be corrected using Word’s find/replace tool, but being able to consolidate the searches within the PerfectIt platform is simply another time-saver. The fewer programs I have to use to get high-quality consistency within the framework of my client’s brief, the more time I save and the better my hourly rate.

A few final comments
One of the big plusses of PerfectIt is its stability. Despite the fact that it’s often asked to work on very large Word documents and check a tonne of stuff, it doesn’t crash. This was true for older versions, and PerfectIt 3 is no different. For me, this is important – I feel confident when I’m using it.

​I also think US$99 for a permanent licence that never expires and permits me to upload PerfectIt onto my laptop and desktop for no extra charge is great value for money. However, I do want that US$99 to offer me a product that’s fit for purpose. PerfectIt 3 is.

If you’re someone who’s reluctant to use software to complement your beady eye, I’d urge you to try this. I don’t say this within the framework of one of those human-vs-machine arguments. Rather, it’s about time.

Even if your eyes are so beady that you will spot every single hyphen that should be an en rule, every double space that should be a single, every missing closing quotation mark, every comma in a large number that should be a non-breaking space, every Mrs. that should be a Mrs, every heading with initial capital letters that should be in sentence case, and so on, using a program such as PerfectIt enables you to make all of those hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of changes more quickly. That’s something that can’t be argued with – it’s a fact that PerfectIt works faster than my hand, so why would I not reduce the likelihood of eyestrain and RSI by getting it to do the donkey work?

The faster I work to bring high-quality consistency to my clients’ files, the sooner I can get down to the business of actually reading the text word by word and line by line, for sense and context. The more efficient I am, the better my hourly rate. Increased efficiency means I can accept more projects from more clients because I have more time.

I want my business to be profitable. I want my clients to be thrilled with the quality of my work, so much so that they retain my services. PerfectIt is one tool that enables those two ‘wants’ to sit at the same table with ease. 

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

In ‘On Ethics: The Ethics of Ballpark Quoting’ (An American Editor, June 2016), Rich Adin posed the following questions:

1. Is it ethical for copyeditors to ever do ballpark pricing as a way to induce clients to hire them?
2. Does the editor have an ethical obligation to not give ballpark quotes, because they can mislead a client about the real cost?
3. If the editor gives a ballpark quote, is there an ethical limit to how much the final bill can exceed the ballpark price?

He concluded that the ballpark pricing mechanism is unethical.

Rich asked me whether I’d like to write a rebuttal, given that we disagree on the matter, and I accepted.

You can read my response in full here: ‘On Ethics: The Ethics of Ballpark Quoting – A Rebuttal’.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and the curator of The Proofreader's Parlour. She is also the author of Business Planning for Editorial Freelancers, Marketing Your Editing & Proofreading Business, and Omnibus: Editorial Business Planning & Marketing Plus.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, follow her on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

My colleague Helen Mortimer has kindly supplied instructions for uploading my PDF proofreading stamps into PDF-XChange Editor 6.0 (the latest version of the software).

Don't forget that instructions for the following are also available:

• PDF-XChange (Pro and the free Viewer; written instructions and video)
• PDF-XChange Editor 3.0 (courtesy of Steve Hammatt)
• Acrobat 9 (Standard and the free Reader)
• Acrobat <9 (Standard and the free Reader)
• Acrobat X (courtesy of Jenny Macgregor)

See Installation Instructions for Proofreading Stamps for more information.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and the curator of The Proofreader's Parlour. She is also the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

My new free PDF resource for independent authors is out now: The Mechanics of Self-Publishing Print Books: 10 guidelines in 10 minutes.

Aimed at writers who want to do their own print formatting – using Word – this PDF toolkit helps the independent, self-publishing author to deliver a professional-looking book to market. The guidelines are based on my own experience of publishing three print books, and my previous career experience within the publishing industry​.

And, because time is precious to us all, I've designed it so that each of the 10 sections can be read in a minute!

If you'd like to download this booklet's sister PDF, visit: The Mechanics of ​Self-Publishing Ebooks: 10 guidelines in 10 minutes

Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.

One of the functions I was sorry to lose when I upgraded to Office 365 (for PC) was the ability to create Style Sets in Word.

I used to create styles for a particular client, save them as a Style Set, and open them in other files as and when I needed them.

​This came in handy in two situations: 

• Proofreading (or proof-editing) for clients who sent me multiple chapter files for a single job.
• Proofreading (or proof-editing) for clients who sent me single files for multiple jobs, sometimes weeks or months apart.

There is an easy, if a little more long-winded, solution for those who are editing or proofreading on a PC using Word 2016.

Either read and follow steps 1–10 below, or watch a short video in which I walk you through the process – it's perfectly simple, I promise!​

1. Open up the document you want to import styles from and save it as a .dotx (template). Close this file. Consider naming your new template such that it’s easily identifiable in the future (e.g. PublisherXStyles.dotx or AuthorNameStyles.dotx). I like to keep my style templates in a distinct folder for ease of access.

2. Now open the document you want to import styles into.

​3. Make sure the Developer tab is available on your ribbon. To do this, open Word. Choose File, Options, Customize Ribbon. Ensure that Developer is checked. Click OK.

4. Click on the Developer tab.

5. Select Document Template.

6. Click on the Organizer button.

7. Select the Close File button.

8. Now the button has changed to Open File. Click on it and browse for the template you want to import styles from.

9. After you’ve selected your file, it will show up in the Styles available in: box. In the window above, you’ll see a list of all the styles available for import (use the toolbar to scroll up and down if you can’t find what you want). Now click on the style you want to import and press the Copy button.

​If you want to copy a group of styles next to each other, use Shift-click to select. If you want to copy several styles that are not next to each other, use Ctrl-click to select.

​Bingo – your new styles will show up in the left-hand window of the Organizer box.

10. Close the Organizer pane and head over to the Home tab on the ribbon. Your imported styles will now show up in the Styles pane.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

(Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Futureproofs so this article is doubtless biased – although it's also entirely honest!)

Regular readers may recall that, a few months ago, Louise wrote an excellent review of Futureproofs. ​

(For everyone else – Futureproofs is a web-based platform for on-screen proofreading that is designed specifically for publishing workflows. With simple markup based on the BSI or Chicago standards, collaboration to resolve queries and real-time data for project management, Futureproofs aims to provide the tools that editors, proofreaders and authors actually need.)

In her review, Louise praised many aspects of how Futureproofs works (my particular favourite was her description of our markup tools as ‘frankly gorgeous’!) but also had some absolutely legitimate criticisms. There were (and are) plenty of places where we could improve. We've been heads-down improving things in the past few months, so Louise asked me to take a look back and talk about how we've got on since her original review.

Search
This was the major area where Louise thought we needed to improve, and we've done so. From March this year, we've had a completely revamped search tool. The way this works now will be familiar to everyone who uses MS Word or Adobe Reader – every term is highlighted on the page, and you can quickly step from one to the next. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing this for a web interface was a real challenge!

Of course, we've kept the advanced search panel, too, which shows you the full context for every result in the proof. This makes it much easier to identify one particular result among many uses of a word in the book. In addition, we still provide both exact search matches and smart matches to help you find your results as quickly as possible.

Overall, search is vastly better than it was a few months ago and I'm very grateful to Louise (and many other users) who helped us with feedback and advice to get there.

Navigation
One of Louise's first suggestions for improving Futureproofs was bookmarking, and we've obliged. You can now bookmark any page in the proof within Futureproofs and name it – ideal for cross-referencing with the table of contents or the answer section of a textbook.

These bookmarks are also shared across the team – so, if one person creates the bookmarks, everyone benefits.

In addition to bookmarks, we've introduced a thumbnail-navigation mode to Futureproofs, so you can navigate visually through your book to find a particular page. Especially for books with lots of artworks, this can be a great time-saver.

Also, we've added a 'Jump back' button that returns you to the previous page you were working on. So, if you need to visit the table of contents to check a chapter title, you're just one click away from your previous page and quickly continuing with your proofread. It's a small thing but often useful!

Other things
As well as the things that Louise picked out, we've continued to improve in other areas. We now have a comprehensive Maths markup tool, for example, and it's easier than ever to collate a master proof and then to compare this with updated proofs to ensure that all corrections are made.

And we've just released a new way for designers to work within Futureproofs, too – to review corrections on the master proof, to check them off as they're done, and to raise queries about anything that's not clear. We're really excited about this because it supports a full 360º workflow, helping everyone involved to work within Futureproofs.

The bottom line is that we're hugely grateful for all the feedback we get from our users – ​especially when they point out where we're getting things wrong. We're always looking to improve Futureproofs, and there are several big things coming later this year that could make a real difference. (Let's just say that the poor quality of many ebooks really annoys me!)

John Pettigrew is the CEO & Founder of We Are Futureproofs – a company dedicated to making editors' lives better by creating software that is designed for the jobs they actually do. Before this, he headed up the editorial team for International Education at Cambridge University Press, survived as a freelance editor for six years, and has created both leading print books and acclaimed iPad apps.

Connect with John on Twitter and LinkedIn.