Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

It may seem easier and cheaper to have an all-in-one editor, this way you get all the editing done in one go. Let me tell you why you shouldn’t do this.

It’s very rare that someone intentionally goes out to exclude someone through their writing, and most people don’t mean to throw in sexist stereotypes when they’re writing a book. And yet it happens every day. . . . Why is this? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

A style sheet is basically a smaller style guide customized to each project. Style guides tell us the rules of English. The purpose of style guides is to ensure consistency throughout writing so we know what a piece of text is talking about. What if there wasn’t a single source telling us how to use a semicolon? I think; we’d use them; whenever we wanted. And it would be; confusing for everyone involved. So style guides are important.

There are a lot of things to consider when hiring an editor, so here are eight tips to help you make the right decision.

Proofreading is for last-minute touch-ups before publishing.

Some things a proofreader might look for are errors in punctuation, grammar, spelling, and simple formatting. They’ll make sure all the cross-references that say, “See page X for more information about this,” actually line up and have the correct page number. They’ll make sure a chapter number isn’t skipped or duplicated, that words aren’t cut off by graphics, that the pages look nice and clean. All the little details that you don’t really want to take the time to check are important, that’s what a proofreader will do for you—in addition to checking for typos, punctuation errors, and inconsistent grammar.

There is a lot that goes into writing a book. Then, after you finish writing the book, there’s still a million more things to do! I hope this post will help you stay on track and take all the necessary steps to publish your book.