You need to try this very tool that I am using to have a flawless-looking book. Here’s how to edit your books for free with Grammarly.
So let's get this straight, you need to get your book edited. But even if you aren't on a budget, sometimes, the best way to go about getting it edited is by letting your computer do the editing.
Now, I know many of you will tell me this isn't possible. Because the software on your computer can't do a good job. It's not going to find the mistakes that a human editor is going to find.
That's partially true, keep in mind that there are different types of editors and different types of editing that can be done on any given manuscript. But for this article, I'm going to focus on the most important type, at least the first level.
It would be the grammatical mistakes that you're making inside of your book. I'm going to be discussing the free tool which is Grammarly. I know when I was first getting started, I was taking my books and running them through multiple editors.
Trying to see if they went through all of these books. They would be able to find all the mistakes. But at the end of the day, they still weren't finding some of the mistakes that were in some of my earlier books. One of the reasons why is that humans can only be expected to find so much.
It also depends upon the Calibre, in the earliest editors that I was using. I was taking High School teachers who were selling their gigs on Fiverr. Some of the work they did was plenty good, where they were able to find several different things.
I then tested out a large number of different pieces of software to figure out the ones that would work best. Now, some of them, you can still use and I would still recommend it's running through grammar checking and things like that.
Check out this related article: How To Format Your Books For Amazon KDP
The other one would be Libre Writer. It is a fantastic way to go. I have used Pro Writing Aid but one of the challenges I had with it was that it found 6 million mistakes with any given document that I had. Just so many mistakes that made it a little bit challenging to go about correcting it.
I would spend so much time trying to fix every little mistake that Pro Writing Aid was finding that I ended up not using it so much. Even though I own a lifetime membership to that particular tool. We'll do a review at some point on that particular tool.
For now, we're going to discuss everything you need to know about Grammarly. Now, the thing with Grammarly that makes it fantastic is that it's available on every possible platform you can imagine. For me, I like to use just the web version of it, it's just fine.
One of the things is you can take your document and you can import it directly into the file. You can see on the online version of Grammarly, I've taken a sample text that was filled with grammatical errors I found online and just can't paste it directly in there.
The first thing you're going to need to do is set up a free account with Grammarly. Then, you can add it to Google Chrome as an add-on or a plugin for your Chrome browser. From there, you're going to have all of the benefits that you get from the free version of Grammarly.
This includes when you have your Gmail and the spelling things that you need to have done there or on other sites. It's going to give you the ability to do that spelling very easily with very little effort. It just does it as you type, which makes it fantastic.
In addition, you can import your entire Word document directly into Grammarly and then export it back in that docs format type. It makes it easy to take your book and run it through an intense grammar check. I have not found another tool as good as Grammarly when it comes to doing that first-level editing of your book.
Fixing The Issues Using Grammarly
So, one of the biggest things about it is that when you look at sometimes the negative comments that come on Amazon for self-published books and even published books, it's that they'll say, oh there were so many grammatical mistakes inside of the book. It’s distracting
Grammarly is going to get rid of all of those mistakes. If your story is terrible or if the information that you’re giving in your non-fiction book is useless, well obviously, Grammarly is not going to be able to fix that. That's not this type of editing.
But it is going to find all of the lower-level mistakes that so many writers make. I was going through with a client the other day and we were looking at the best sellers in romance books. I think it was the third best-seller there but they had a grammatical mistake in their very first sentence, in the very first chapter.
It was unbelievable but I was pointing out that even with fixing lots of grammar and going through thousands of phases of grammatical changes or editing, you won't necessarily find every mistake. But Grammarly is going to find those mistakes, the mistakes that I often see people making.
There are a lot of fake gurus out there who will tell you that you need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting your books edited. I'm telling you, you don't need to do that. Now, I get a lot of pushback and people say, no I need my book to be perfect before I can put it on the market.
Here, I'm going to tell you a little dirty secret. It's that as long as your book is getting an average of four to five stars, it's good enough. It doesn't have to be flawless, you don't need 20 rounds of editing and then re-editing.
Some people ask me, look, there are like 20 types of editing that can be done to my book and I'm on the 18th one and I have spent twenty thousand dollars on this book, so what am I supposed to do? My answer is you should jump into Grammarly and let it do a lot of that heavy lifting.
If you want to run it through additional people who can read through the book, then let them do that. But for the most part, when you're first getting started and building an audience, you don't need to spend ten to twenty thousand dollars on our book editing.
Check out this related article: What I Wish I Knew Before Self Publishing
We can just start with Grammarly for free. We can read through the book and listen to it but this is a great place to start. So, let me show you the magic of Grammarly. The first thing is that it underlines everything in red.
So, when I click on 14 it immediately says if you don't want 14 to be marked as misspelled in the future you can add it to your dictionary. So that's one option we have as you'll find a lot of other things.
You can see all of the mistakes it finds and then what happens is that we can just click on it to correct your spelling. It even recognizes which preposition should be used even if the spelling is correct. It knows at a high level what you need to be doing with your text to fix it.
So, we got the first level down. If we fixed all of the first-level mistakes using Grammarly and then we go into the next one. It says we found five additional writing issues. Now, when it comes to the premium version, it underlines it and says to see punctuation in compound-complex sentences, faulty tense sequence, improper formatting, and monotonous sentences.
I noticed with the free version that I just used, it went through the first layer stuff where it's able to find a lot of these misspellings, extra spaces, and some of these things. But then the next level, which is on the premium version, it's going to find exactly the deeper level things like inconsistencies.
If we just take a quick look at the different versions, you have the premium and you have the business, you will see that they have several different things. So, everything is free right? The same thing is the free stuff and then you have full sentence rewrites. Isn’t that pretty amazing?
We'll rewrite the sentence for you, so you do not have to do it; word choice. So what will happen is it will find like using a thesaurus and it will replace those words. The tone suggestions, make sure you're doing that correctly in citations, proofread citations and identify where they're needed.
Get The Most Out Of The Free Version
So, you have a lot of different things and obviously, the next one is the style guide and snippets and all sorts of interesting stuff. But one of the things is you have these multiple areas like for correctness and you'll see that on the free version, we'll at least be able to get grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
This is the reason I'm telling you that you should at least give the free version a chance. Install it on your thing, see if you like it and from there, you'll be able to figure out if this is right for you. If you need beyond clarity, it gives you conciseness but not full sentence rewrites or formatting which it will give you on the premium and the business version.
On the engagement, we get absolutely nothing. Their word choice, the delivery it does, and tone detection on the free version. But it won't be doing any of the suggestions on how to change the tone.
Are you writing a technical document? Is this part of a story? Well, is this a school paper you're writing? What exactly is the tone that you need for the type of writing that you're doing? This is something that you're going to find in Grammarly.
The other thing is on citations where you can do auto citations to all of them. But in terms of the style formatting and plagiarism detection and this one is a huge one I can tell you my book has been ripped off and put on the internet for free and I was able to use plagiarism detection to find where exactly somebody had ripped off the text that I had.
Also, if you hire people to do ghostwriting for your books as well, you're going to want to be able to make sure they're not stealing doc text from somebody else. I tried it on Fiverr, I gave it a chance and they had stolen huge portions of the book from somewhere else.
So, I was able to identify using a plagiarism checker to make sure there wasn't going to be a problem. As you can see, you can establish roles in single sign if this is for the business version which I don't suggest necessarily going to that.
Then, the team features give people the ability to work within the team. So, you can see if you go for the free version, you get it exactly free. You don't have to pay a single thing.
Check out this related article: How To Write, Publish, And Sell An Ebook
I recommend that no matter who you are and no matter how many editors even if you're one of those people following the fake gurus who are telling you that need 20 editors to do your book, I'm telling you that at least you should run it through Grammarly before you even give it to those editors.
So, you've already cleaned up a lot of the mistakes that are within that document. If you go for the premium which is the one I would suggest unless you're running a full business and need more advanced than that, it's going to be about 12 a month.
From there, you're going to have all of the rich features that are in there. To make sure that your ideal readers are not going to be complaining about exactly what you're delivering to them. So, in other words, when you're putting a book onto the market when your readers read it, they're not going to complain about that.
Let them complain about your story or plot or maybe the information they don't agree with some of the stuff that you're posting in your non-fiction books. But don't let it be about your style or the grammatical mistakes that you're making. Like much of your competition may be making with their books and people are complaining about it.
That makes the reading experience much more positive. And again increases the chances we're going to be getting these 4 and 5-star reviews which is what we are trying to get for our books. We don't want to make it as the person is reading; they're continually stopping and having to reread because of the common mistakes that you're making.
So, check out Grammarly. I support them and I use their tool and that's the reason why I use their affiliate link on my page. So, go ahead and check that out, I suggest you install it. Give it a chance and if you like it or don't like it, then let me know.
Also, let me know below in the comments if you currently use Grammarly or if you don't use it. If you don't, then let me know. I really would like to know because it's important. Check out my other articles and videos that will answer your other self-publishing questions.