Should You Get an Editorial Analysis?

How do you ensure the success of your book in the marketplace? It’s a tricky question—one to which there’s no single, definitive answer.

There’s no guarantee that a specific book will resonate with an audience. After all, even best-selling writers release books that flop from time to time. And these are books with major advertising budgets!

There is one guarantee, however: books that have been edited almost always sell better.

Do you know how strong your book is from an editorial standpoint? This is an important question because errors affect the reader’s experience when they read your book.

We’ve all picked up a book, magazine, or newspaper and enjoyed it … until we stumbled across a misspelled word, an improper shift in tense, or a misplaced modifier.

These kinds of mistakes affect readers in two ways:

1) They pull readers’ focus away from the argument/story.
2) They make readers question the expertise/professionalism of the writer.

Either of these could lead to a writer’s worst fear: readers putting your book down permanently!

If you don’t know how strong your book is from an editorial standpoint, why not get an expert analysis?

When you get an editorial analysis of your manuscript (for the sake of this example, with Wheatmark), a senior-level book editor reads your work with an eye to your book’s strengths and weaknesses.

The editor will give you a five-to-ten page summary of how your book reads, recommend the degree to which your manuscript should be edited (Wheatmark, for example, has four different levels of editing), and edit sample pages for you to review.

(One important note: what the editor will not tell you is whether your book deserves to be published. You took all this time and effort to write your book, after all—the odds are very high that there’s someone out there who’ll want to read it!)

In my capacity as a publishing consultant at Wheatmark, I encourage every single writer who publishes with us to get an editorial analysis. I hope you can see why.

So if you’ve got a manuscript that you’re thinking about publishing, what are you waiting for?

Get started with an editorial analysis today!

Look and Search Inside a Book Online (Inside Search)

Have you ever found a book online about your favorite subject, but didn’t buy it right then because you weren’t sure what was inside? You may have gotten in the car and driven to the nearest bookstore to check it out before you made your decision … and bought it online later for less.

What about the book you’ve written? Can your audience look inside it online to help them make up their minds about it? How many more people do you think would buy your book if they could look inside and make a decision to buy on the spot?

You can now have your readers browse the inside of your book. Amazon and Google have started scanning the interiors of books so that their search engines would be able to retrieve and organize information from inside printed books as well. A few days ago Microsoft launched a similar program called Live Search Books. (Wheatmark is among Microsoft’s first book publishing partners.) Here are examples of a book published by Wheatmark shown by these three vendors.

Amazon.com - click on the book's cover to see inside
Google Book Search
Live Search Books

As you can see, people can look inside and browse the book before they decide to buy it. Don’t worry, the content is secure, you can neither download it nor read all of the pages online.

The ability to look inside your book, however, is only a small part of the overall benefit of the inside search concept. Sure, it helps for readers to peek inside your book once they've found it, but what about the part of your audience that has not yet found your book? How will they find it?

Enter the real beauty of inside search. Let me explain.

Take the book mentioned above, Arizona Laws 101, as an example. You are searching for books online for information about, say, DUI laws in the state of Arizona. If all that’s available to the search engine is the title of this book, it will not show up at all in these search results, since you were not searching for the phrase in the title. But if the search engine is able to search within the book, it will see that it has a whole chapter on DUI laws in Arizona. Therefore, the book will show up in your search results.

Try it yourself: Go to books.live.com and search for the phrase “driving under the influence in Arizona.” The book will be prominently placed in the search results, and it will even show you what pages contain the words you searched for.

Is your book full of keywords and phrases that people are searching for online? Would you like to reach readers who search online for topics that your book addresses? You should definitely make your book searchable inside.