Today, I finished the Pro-Writing Aid review of my final chapter and end matter. Even after addressing all of the issues that the software raised, some of my scores were low because of rules the software had wrong, which was frustrating. For example, I’m writing non-fiction and use a lot of headings and subtitles. Each of those was marked as a sentence fragment and counted against my style score. (Having to review and approve each one was more annoying than the ultimate score impact, but still). I could have disabled the rule, but then I wouldn’t have had the chance to catch actual sentence fragments in my writing.
Anyway, I have a few suggestions to make to PWA for how they hand Scrivener files, but for now, I am done with the software.
My next step will be to print out my manuscript again and this time read it aloud for my final review pass. After that, it’s on to formatting. This time, I’m going to use the Reedsy editor for formatting and avoid the headache that was trying to do the whole thing manually with Calibre and an html editor as I have in the past. If that works, then I may update my old books the same way, especially if the formatting ends up looking nicer this way!
To be honest, just like my first failure with a cover, I don’t know what “good” formatting should look like or what I should be aiming for. In my previous books, I just looked to avoid mistakes, but I get the sense now that it’s more than that. So, I’ll be learning with this process.
I have also decided to shift my focus entirely to my non-fiction for the time being and to put the Book 1 Project on hold as soon as I finish the current chapter. This is the season that my non-fiction writing makes most of its income, and if I want to maximize my opportunities, I need to be paying more attention there!