Proofreading is the final check on a finished, typeset book: typos, missing words, inconsistent spellings, bad line breaks, a chapter heading in the wrong font. It is deliberately narrow. Most self-published books that read badly have been proofread and never edited — the errors are gone and the problems remain.
What is proofreading, and why it isn't editing
What each pass catches — and what it leaves
The rows are in order. Doing them out of order means paying twice, because a copy-edit invalidates a proofread.
| Pass | Catches | Leaves alone | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developmental | Structure, pacing, argument, point of view | Every sentence | £1,500–£4,800 |
| Line edit | Rhythm, repetition, over-explanation, flat prose | Structure, spelling conventions | £800–£2,000 |
| Copy-edit | Grammar, consistency, house style, factual slips, style sheet | Your voice, the structure | £800–£1,600 |
| Proofread | Typos, doubled words, layout, running heads, page numbers | Everything above | £400–£800 |
The pre-publication checklist
The forty things to check before a book goes to print, in order, from front matter to running heads — the list professional proofreaders work from. Emailed as a printable PDF.
The narrowness is the point
A proofreader is not being lazy by ignoring your clunky paragraph. They are working to a defined scope, at the end of a process, on a file that has already been typeset — and the cost of changing wording at that stage is that the text reflows and the page count moves.
This is why 'I just need a proofread' is so often the wrong request. If nobody has copy-edited the book, a proofreader will hand back a clean file with all your inconsistencies faithfully preserved.
What a proofreader actually finds
Typos and doubled words. Their for there. A character called Steven in chapter two and Stephen in chapter nine. Hyphenation that changes across the book. A missing closing quotation mark that turns four pages of dialogue inside out. Chapter numbers that skip fourteen. A running head still saying the working title. Widows, orphans and a stray line on its own page.
Most of these are invisible to the author. You are not reading the page; you are reading your memory of the page.
Why proofreading your own book fails, and what to do about it
You wrote it, so you know what it should say, and your eye supplies it. This is not a discipline problem — it is how reading works.
What helps: change the medium (read it on paper, or on a phone rather than a laptop), change the typeface, read it backwards paragraph by paragraph, and read dialogue aloud. Each of those breaks the pattern-matching just enough to make the words visible again.
What helps most is time. A fortnight between finishing and proofreading is worth more than any technique.
Where automated checks help and where they don't
Spell-checkers catch non-words. They do not catch real words in the wrong place, which is most of what survives to the proofreading stage: form for from, casual for causal, pubic for public — the last of which has reached print in more books than anyone admits.
A good automated proofread does something narrower and more useful: it holds the whole book in view at once and reports inconsistencies a human eye loses across 300 pages. Which spelling of judgement you used where. Whether the dog changed breed. Whether chapter fourteen exists.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
Proofread does the last pass on a chapter or the whole book, and the design decision worth knowing is that it does not rewrite your wording. It reports what it finds and you decide — because a tool that quietly 'improves' sentences at the proofreading stage is a tool that changes your voice without asking.
It works alongside the Book Dictionary, which holds your book's own spellings, names and conventions, so the proofread checks against your style sheet rather than a generic one. If your character is Aoife and your business is spelled without an apostrophe, that is what gets enforced.
The honest limit: the final typeset proof still deserves human eyes. What this does is catch most of it first, which makes that human proofread shorter — and proofreaders charge by the hour.
Proofread a chapter
Upload a manuscript written anywhere
Email me the checklistQuestions people ask
- Do I need a proofreader if I've had a copy-edit?
- Yes, though it will be a quick one. Copy-editing introduces its own errors, and typesetting introduces more. The final pass exists because every previous stage touched the file.
- How much does proofreading cost in the UK?
- Roughly £400–£800 for a full-length book. The CIEP suggested minimum rate is £31.92 an hour, and most proofreaders manage 3,000–5,000 words an hour depending on the state of the text.
- Can I proofread my own book?
- You can improve it substantially — read it on paper, in a different typeface, after a fortnight's gap. You will not get it clean. Nobody does on their own work.
- What's the difference between proofreading and copy-editing?
- A copy-editor may change your wording for consistency, grammar and style, and builds a style sheet. A proofreader checks the result against that style sheet and fixes what slipped. Different scope, different stage, different price.
- When should proofreading happen?
- After typesetting, on the file that will actually be printed. Proofreading a Word document and then typesetting it means proofreading again.