Some time next week this current book will go off to the agent for her perusal. I started it back in November. The first rough draft was finished three weeks ago or so. The last few have been spent variously reading and revising. I'm now close to the final read through and revise before delivery.

What's the best way to go through this process? Easy. Put yourself in the position of your eventual reader and try to see it through his or her eyes. It's easier than you think.

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I always read a manuscript from several different perspectives. First, in Scrivener when it's written. Then, when I'm happy everything is in the right order, in a standard word processor -- currently Pages -- to see how it looks there. After that it gets printed out in the fashion writers have been doing for years -- as A4 pages, in a big font in 1.5 line spacing in my case, though you may choose other formatting.

These are all great methods for seeing a MS the way an author or editor or agent should. But we need more. Something happens when that final MS gets turned into typesetting. As authors we understand this implicitly. Whenever we get final typeset galleys back for the book we always stare at something on the page and think, 'How the hell did I let that through?'

Changing from 12 pt Optima at A4 to 10 pt times to a book size does something. The same words appear differently.

Here's another truth too. When readers have a book in front of them things change again. They see your work two pages at a time, not one. As authors and editors we tend to focus on the paragraph in front of us and check how that works against the three or four around it. Not so readers. They can glance back to the previous page and see a much greater context.

So how about doing a final read through in the form a reader will one day see the book -- as facing pages in the small type and line spacing of a paperback?

It's dead easy usually. You just set it up in your print settings. Here's what it looks like for me.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-27-at-08-01-22.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-27-at-08-01-22-tm.jpg" alt="Screen shot 2010-04-27 at 08.01.22.png" width="500" height="291"></a>

My business printer is an ancient Kyocera 1020D that's been doing stalwart service for six years or more. Fantastic machine. It will print out the pages side by side, two per sheet. As you can see here it can also do two-sided or duplex printing too. That means it sucks the page back after it's printed and prints the following pages on the other side. Nice feature if you have it. Saves paper and makes the whole thing more book-like too.

I would never, ever dream of sending off a book without printing it out this way. However carefully you've proofed, on screen and on standard A4 output, you will always see something that needs to be fixed.

Here (smaller than life size even when you click on it) is what it looks like when printed.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pages.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pages-tm.jpg" alt="Pages.png" width="500" height="351"></a>