Editing My Book

I am still in the long process of editing my first novel. I began editing on my computer, which saves a lot of time when doing searches for certain words or doing mass substitutions. I also followed the standard advice about reading the story out loud - I read the book to my wife and kids, and this did allow me to find other obvious mistakes.

However, I have found a far more useful way of doing the editing, and I have not seen anyone mention doing this before (though I admit I have certainly not read everyone’s blogs). I 'published' my book on LuLu.com. I did it only for myself and did not reserve an ISBN number. What I found is that holding what appears to be an actual book in my hand allowed me to find so many more problems than I have ever found while reading the text on the computer. Somehow, just seeing the story as a book is both satisfying in some odd way (odd since it is not a truly published book) and also gives me a deeper view of the material as I read it, thus letting me fix things better. I highly recommend this method!