Once I had finished the novel (or at least finished the story), I then had to go back through the entire text and edit my work. That took a long, long time - months. I first read back through it in Microsoft Word. This was a long process because I still had to balance this with work and family and friends and such. Spell Checker worked great, but spell checker does not catch everything. "Ther" could be replaced automatically with "there" while it might have needed to only be "the". There were a lot of these types of errors that I had to go back and catch; and I did not hire someone to do this for me. I had to go through every line of text and do it myself.

Once I felt that I had done as much online (in Microsoft Word) as I could, I went back and printed all of the pages to paper. At this point, I went back over every page and caught more errors that I had not caught while reviewing the digital copy. There were even plot problems that caught on the printed copy that I had not even thought about while reviewing the digital copy. If you are reviewing your work, a printed copy is absolutely necessary. You just tend to notice more when the work is on paper in front of you.

Once I had finished all of the updates on paper, I then had to go back to the digital copy in Microsoft Word and update all of the changes there. It is cool also that I now have a marked-up copy of the original printed pages that I keep as a momento (maybe one day it will worth more than the printed books... it could happen).

Even going through this process, there are still errors that I did not catch before I sent it to the printing house. Hiring a professional to review and catch my errors might have been worth the expense, and I may do this on my future novels. It was probably nerves that kept me from showing the work to someone else for fear of having them judge it before I even got it printed and bound.