5 Key Things Editors Look for When Editing Your Book

Self-editing a book is difficult for one not-so-obvious reason: when you reread your manuscript, your mind often fills in what’s missing on the page. 

And after the tenth revision, the awkward sentences start sounding perfectly normal, and you feel like the book cannot be any clearer. That’s why it’s a good idea to hire a professional editor, because they have the benefit of distance. They can tell you when you’re overexplaining, underexplaining, or jumping between ideas without giving the reader enough context. 

However, a comprehensive developmental edit isn’t always affordable for first-time authors working within tight budgets. In such cases, self-editing your manuscript before handing it to a line editor or copyeditor can reduce the amount of paid work required. Once you weed out the major problems, the line editor can work on the final polishing of the rough edges. 

But, where do you begin the self-edit?

The trick is not to read the manuscript from beginning to end asking, “Is this good?” That question is far too broad. Instead, edit for one problem at a time. 

Here are 5 critical things professional editors look for in a manuscript and practical ways you can evaluate them yourself.

#1 Clarity in idea arrangement

When self-editing nonfiction, look closely at places where you introduce a new idea, framework, technical term, person, or argument. For example, here’s a sentence:

“This creates the same problem discussed earlier.”

Where exactly was it discussed? What problem? Will someone reading the chapter three days after the previous one remember? Sometimes repeating two or three words is better than forcing the reader to retrieve information from 40 pages ago mentally. 

Specifically check for:

• Terms introduced without explanation
• Steps skipped because they seemed “obvious”
• Statements such as “as discussed earlier” where the topic was only revealed pages ago

You may also discover that one paragraph is trying to explain three ideas, or that three paragraphs are explaining the same one. Fix the idea arrangement and density first. Grammar can come after that. 

In fiction, clarity problems show up differently. You might know that Daniel leaves the house angry because of something his brother said that morning, but if you shortened that breakfast scene during your fourth revision, his reaction may now be unjustified. 

The same thing happens with character motivations, locations, timelines, and pronouns whose references and justifications are obvious to you but not the reader. 

When self-editing fiction for clarity, check whether:

• Pronouns have obvious antecedents
• Characters’ actions have understandable motivations
• New concepts are explained before you build on them
• Supporting information appears where the reader needs it to understand a concept
• Long sentences don’t carry too many ideas at once
• Jargon is necessary for your intended audience.

One useful technique is to temporarily forget about style and summarize every couple of pages in a few words in the margin. If you cannot clearly and cohesively say how each chapter is moving the story forward, the reader may struggle to follow your story.

#2 Consistency in terminology, spelling, and approach

Inconsistencies can be quite small or embarrassingly big.

In nonfiction, consistency problems usually appear in terminology, capitalization, numbers, abbreviations, citations, and how you define key concepts. You may write email in one chapter and e-mail in another, or your nonfiction book switches between health care and healthcare every 20 pages.

For fiction, inconsistency can be as damaging as someone remembering an event that contradicts an earlier chapter. 

Don’t rely on memory to catch these. Create a style sheet as you edit and record these decisions. For fiction, you might record:

• character names and spellings
• ages
• appearance
• relationships
• important dates
• locations
• timeline of major events
• invented terminology
• rules governing your fictional world (especially for fantasy, science-fiction, and historical fiction) 

For nonfiction, track things such as:

• capitalization choices
• preferred spellings
• terminology
• abbreviations
• number formatting
• dates
• citation conventions
• names of organizations and products

Search your manuscript for likely variants instead of rereading 50,000 words hoping you’ll spot them. This preparation is especially useful for authors planning to publish independently, because inconsistency is an avoidable self-publishing mistake that can make an otherwise good book look unfinished.

#3 Fact-checking

Maybe you’ve repeated a statistic for years and never checked the source. Maybe the quote you’ve seen attributed to Einstein on 20 websites was never actually said by Einstein. Editors ensure that the information presented as “facts” in your book are, in fact, true!

In fiction, you do not need to become an expert in everything your characters do, but verify details that affect the credibility of a scene. Dates, travel times, geography, medical procedures, historical events, legal processes, and technology are common trouble spots. If you’re unsure about something while self-editing your manuscript, insert [CHECK] beside it and deal with all such markers during a dedicated fact-checking pass.

In nonfiction, factual accuracy is even more important to the credibility of your book. If you’re making a claim that a yoga technique has a proven scientific impact for a practitioner, you must be able to present the evidence that you’re basing your claim on. 

And if you used a chatbot during research, verify its output independently. 

Hallucinated facts are one of several common pitfalls of AI-written text. Pay particular attention to:

• Names of persons and quotations
• Dates, historical events
• Statistics, study findings, and scientific claims
• Health and wellness claims
• Legal or financial statements
• Study findings
• Claims about companies, products, or real people

#4 Flow, pacing, and repetition across chapters

That is usually a flow problem.

To catch redundancy, write a one-line description beside every chapter, answering the question, “What does this chapter add?” If two descriptions are almost identical, you may have found the issue. 

A manuscript can contain good sentences and still be exhausting to read. That is usually a pacing problem. Inspect the order in which information appears to catch flow, pacing, and continuity problems. Suppose Chapter 4 introduces a problem, Chapter 5 explains why it happens, Chapter 6 suddenly goes on a lengthy historical detour, and Chapter 7 finally gives the solution promised three chapters earlier. Every chapter might be interesting by itself, but the reader is still being made to wait unnecessarily.

Similarly, a chapter may sound perfect but still feel out of place. If a transition between two sections feels awkward, don’t automatically insert however, therefore, or on the other hand. Sometimes the transition isn’t missing—the two sections simply don’t belong next to each other.

Pro-tip: First-time nonfiction writers often repeat important points because they are worried the reader might miss them. Repetition sometimes helps, but repeating the same ideas in slightly different wording usually doesn’t.

#5 Is the author’s voice intact in AI-assisted books?

Maybe you naturally use short sentences during tense moments. Maybe your nonfiction voice includes the occasional dry aside. Maybe you like starting a sentence with And. These little habits are part of what makes the book sound like you.

If you’ve used AI while writing or self-editing, read those sections aloud and listen for places where your voice suddenly disappears. A chatbot might “smooth out” an awkward sentence, but it can just as easily replace a very you sentence with something grammatically immaculate and completely soulless.

With AI-rewritten passages, watch particularly for:

• Vocabulary you would never normally use
• Sudden shifts between formal and conversational language
• Generic introductions and conclusions
• Unnecessary summaries of points you’ve already made
• Repeated sentence structures
• Weird metaphors that sound impressive but don’t actually mean anything

Pro tip: Never ask a chatbot to simply “polish my chapter” and accept everything it changes. Tell it what you want fixed. For example, you could ask GPT to “Correct grammar, punctuation, and obvious awkward phrasing. Do not rewrite stylistic choices or change the author’s tone.” Even then, inspect the changes before approving.

Self-editing is not about proving that you can replace an editor. It is about taking the manuscript as far as you reasonably can before another person sees it.

A cleaner manuscript means a professional editor can spend less time fixing problems you could have caught yourself and more time working on the things that are considerably harder for an author to see: weak motivations, structural gaps, uneven pacing, unclear arguments, subtle inconsistencies, and sentences you’ve read so many times that you can no longer judge them objectively.

Ready for a professional edit?

You can catch a remarkable number of problems by slowing down, separating your editing passes, and looking for one type of issue at a time. But eventually, familiarity becomes the problem, and that’s when we can help.

At Falcon Edits, we work with fiction and nonfiction authors on developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading, and humanizing AI-assisted manuscripts. If you’d like to see what an editor would change before committing to a full edit, get a free editing sample.