Book Proofreading Service
Looking for a high quality book proofreading service?
Ultimate Proofreader can provide all the help that you need
As an author, you will have invested an enormous amount of time and energy into researching and writing your book and then having it edited. You may think it is perfect and ready for publication, but small errors may have crept in which you or even the publisher may have missed. However, your sharp-eyed readers may not! Therefore, the final step you need to take is to have your book proofread to ensure it is perfect as you want it to be.
Why use Ultimate Proofreader?
The professional Book Proofreading Service offered by Ultimate Proofreader can carry out this task for you at an affordable price, giving you peace of mind that your book is ready for publication. Our high-quality service is available for book authors, playwrights, and novelists. When you have finished writing and copy-editing your book, novel, play, short story, or film script, send it to Ultimate Proofreader. Our team of highly experienced English proofreaders and editors, many of whom are writers themselves, will then meticulously go through your work to identify and correct any inadvertent grammatical, punctuation, and/or spelling mistakes. We will also highlight, and where possible correct, any issues relating to consistency. However, we will not change your style of writing, tone, or narrative, as we know how important it is to retain these features of the text.
What exactly will we do?
a) Grammar
Books, whether fiction or non-fiction, are extended pieces of work that can sometimes be over 100,000 words in length. The excessive amount of writing involved and the focus on getting the plot, theme, or narrative right (which takes place at the stage of writing and copy-editing) can often result in grammatical mistakes being left in the initial drafts – which can sometimes be embarrassing.
Before sending your finished piece of work to any prospective publisher, you must
ensure it is free of grammatical errors. Having proofread a great many books in diverse fields by writers with different styles and various standards of English, we have identified and corrected frequent errors of grammar in the following areas:
1) Subject-verb agreement
2) Conjunctions
3) Use of tenses
4) Modifiers, possessive adjectives or pronouns, and split infinitives
5) Use of the apostrophe, or lower and upper case
b) Spelling
A large number of the mistakes we correct in drafts of books, novels, and other literary works are related to spelling. Because the focus during the writing stage is mostly on content, misspellings or inconsistencies between British and American English usage can make their way into the text. This can sometimes be the result of using the predictive text function in Microsoft Word, especially if you did not set the language in your document to the correct English language variant before you began to write.
c) Punctuation
Punctuation is often one of the trickiest and most commonly debated points in English writing. Whilst some writers are minimalists, others fall into the trap of over-punctuation. Our expert book proofreaders will ensure your text strikes the right balance between avoiding under-punctuation (which can confuse the meaning) and over-punctuation (which can make the text difficult to read). In particular, we focus on common issues relating to the (mis)use of commas, semi-colons, single/double speech marks, and the punctuation of dialogue.
d) Consistency
There are few things that annoy readers more than inconsistency. This often arises in relation to grammar and style, typical issues being the inconsistent use of tenses, first-/third-person narration, UK/US spelling and phraseology, and capitalisation. We have also encountered more general inconsistencies, such as the reader being told in an early chapter that ‘my house faces north’ and in a later chapter that ‘my house faces south’. This can and does happen, especially in long novels.
Help us to help you
We can do an excellent book proofreading job for you if you tell us exactly what you want. It is not always enough to tell us that you want proofreading and/or editing. We can, of course, see from your book whether your writing is formal or informal, and also the style of your writing. However, there are other matters we may not know about unless you tell us; for example, do you want to use italics or quotation marks for the names of publications? Do you want to use single or double quotation marks? Consistency is something we strive to ensure when proofreading because inconsistencies in a book are highly unprofessional and likely to upset readers. Your publisher will probably have given you a style sheet because they want all of their books (according to topic) to be of a consistent style. If you self-publish, it will be up to you to prepare your own style sheet, but do not worry, we can advise you on this also.
Free sample!
If you have not previously used our book proofreading services and would like to try before you buy, we offer you the option of a free sample so that you can see for yourself the quality of our work.
To take advantage of this offer, email an extract of up to 200 words of your book to: [email protected]
