There's an old cliche in this business: there are no great writers, only great rewriters. Something to be said for it too. I'm sure there are people who finish their first draft, take a look at it, think 'perfect' and then send it off to an agent or publisher. But not many.

For me revision represents the final five per cent of a book that can make the difference between success and failure. But the process itself is not straightforward and can go awry, just as writing the original may fall apart so easily.

There are two approaches to revising your work, both essential, both complementary. The first is the obvious one: revision from the author's point of view. This entails going through your manuscript word by word, line by line, looking at it from a micro and macro point of view, close up on the page and at a distance from an overall point of view.

The second is the trickier one: trying to see your novel as a remote, dispassionate reader, page by page, not thinking for a moment about changing every literal you come across, simply making a note it's there and needs addressing later. This is where the Kindle (and yes, let me say it before the fanbois squawk, I'm sure the iPad too) has a role. <!--more-->

The simplest way to get a reader's view is to print out your manuscript two pages to an A4 page so that it looks like a proper paperback book, as in the example below. You may think... what? These are the same words? Why on earth would I treat them differently just because the print's smaller, the line spacing is less and there are two pages to a page?

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/print.jpg"><img title="print" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/print.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="320" /></a>

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/print.jpg"></a>Try it and see. I don't know why but those same words become different when they look like a book. All experienced authors know that they see things when their manuscript comes back as a typeset galley. We're immediately banging our heads and asking ourselves, 'How did I miss that?' I can't imagine submitting  a book without printing it out to paper at some stage, even with a Kindle or iPad in the process. The shift from screen to paper changes something, and if you don't accomplish it you're missing a trick.

But all those pages can get tedious after a while, and it's easy to get confused between versions. How about an electronic in between that sits in front of that final paper revise? The Kindle does this beautifully (and I'm talking about the reader here, not the free apps from PCs, Mac, Ipads and phones). If you use the latter <em>and</em> own a Kindle reader you can do this. If you haven't bought the reader you can't. Here's how it works.

When you buy your Kindle Amazon give you a Kindle email address. It's not for email so don't worry about spam. You use it to send documents to your reader. In my case that's usually going to be a Word doc. Curious, I emailed the entire 125K word .docx file of my 2012 book to my Amazon address. A couple of minutes later it was converted and downloaded to the Kindle (and available to the apps too). There are other ways to get things into Kindle by the way, even if you don't own a reader. But I do and I'm lazy. This is it.

What form is my Word file in now? <em>It's a Kindle book</em>. Given the nightmares I've had with formatting for electronic media in the past I am truly astonished to be able to say this. Amazon's system just took that Word file, recognised the chapter headings, and laid everything out perfectly. Even to the extent of setting the first line of each first chapter full out, without an indent <em>which wasn't the way it was in the manuscript </em>(I'm lazy like that). Even to the extent of reading footnotes and handling them properly.

Amazing.

Once it's on the Kindle it's just another title. You can highlight and make notes, as I detailed here the other day. And those annotations get shared between your different Kindle apps.

What does this cost? If you have a wifi only Kindle nothing -- the conversion just happens and comes down the line when you next connect. If you have a 3G and wifi model it's free over wifi too. But if you receive the file by 3G there's a 'small charge', namely £0.20 per MB. There's a really simple way to avoid this altogether. If your Kindle email address is freddo.bloggs@kindle.com just email your personal document to freddo.bloggs@free.kindle.com. That way it will be held until your Kindle has a wifi connection and only come down the line then, for nothing.

That kind of thoughtful aside is typical of this system I have to say.

Another neat trick is that you can allow other people to send documents to your Kindle account. Say you're an agent or publisher, you could put your authors' names into the allowed addresses section of your Kindle account. If they email a Word doc to your Kindle email address that manuscript will turn up on your Kindle, ready formatted for reading.

Here's an important point. That word 'reading'. This is not an editing system. Kindle is the equivalent of that printout view -- you can scribble in comments in the margin but you can't change the actual text.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kindle-docs.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5766" title="kindle docs" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kindle-docs.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="193" /></a>Is there a way an agent could send back an annotated Kindle file to a writer? Not that I can see (though I hope I'm wrong). Amazon seems to turn your personal document into a copy protected book file. So this isn't an easy way for agents, authors and publishers to share revision comments as far as I can see, which is a shame. All you have is the simple facility here -- a clippings file in the documents folder of the reader when you plug it into a computer.

Everything you add to all documents on your reader will be stored here in a single file with information about the date of writing, the book and the location.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kin-notes.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5767" title="kin notes" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kin-notes.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="198" /></a>

Track changes and commenting it isn't.

This does represent a wonderful delivery medium for passing on a manuscript for reading. But the hard work of collaboration will still have to be done on a computer, through something like Word. And no, you can't export that imported personal document on the Kindle back to Word. If you could do that the copy protection would be broken, wouldn't it?

I can't get too worked up about these failings. I like the division between the author view and the reader one. The more perspective I can get on my work the better. I now have a way to do a 'reader revision' without paper. With the Kindle document conversion process it's easy and free. And maybe there are ways around some of these limitations -- I'm new to this thing so I wouldn't know.

I remain impressed though. Reading my 2012 book on Kindle gives me an insight into how it will one day appear, and I'm already thinking of changes and improvements I can make. This is a great writer's tool.