Chris May

One of the first decisions I had to make was whether to use the Troubador copy-edit service. It's quite a lot of money and optional. Also my manuscript has already been through an edit process and I was pretty sure it was clean, in which case I would be spending the money for nothing.

I will never not use a copy editor again!

To be honest I didn't really know what to expect. I thought my manuscript would just be littered with additional bits of punctuation that didn't really add much. And maybe the odd spelling mistake if I hadn't done a thorough enough check.

It was so much more than that. What I got back was a manuscript that was fact checked, where the timeline was verified and with suggestions for better phrasing in a few places. In one place I had written west when I meant east and even pictured it as east. I had missed a letter out of a place name. I had members of the Vatican referring to Your Grace when they should have been referring to Your Eminence. There was even reference to a road that definitely existed when I started the novel a few years ago but clearly doesn't exist today. 

Timelines too were not without their issues and I was amazed to be alerted to contradictory references more than 100 pages apart.

And yes, there was even one spelling mistake and a plethora of missing commas.