You know how you sometimes get a burr or a sliver in your sock, which drives you nuts? Maybe it’s your best pair of socks with a fun design that you want to show off, but since they have this flaw, you keep them hidden under your pants. I felt this way about my first two books, Switching to Light and Turning to Color. This makeover is more than sprucing up the covers; it’s what is inside that has been gnawing at me. 

Before I published the books, I edited them each about a dozen times, and yet I still found errors. My mom read the books and gave me a list of things that needed correcting. This, in my mind, was not acceptable. Even since I’ve published these books, I’ve felt like there is more to fix in these books.

Enter Grammarly! 

I purchased the premium version of Grammarly, going into it with uncertainty if this would pay off. Boy, has it ever!

In between publishing Coping With Yarn, writing my new free story (more on this in the next post!), and doing all the holiday things, I took the time to clean up my first two books.

It took me about 9 days to run Switching to Light and the bonus story through Grammarly. Three thousand edits later, I was done!! Yes, that’s three thousand! After fixing commas, rearranging sentences, adding words, and fixing spelling errors, I was no longer wondering if the premium version of Grammarly was worth it. (And no, this isn’t a paid blog!).

I put Turning to Color in Grammarly, and once again, the number of changes was still in the thousands. I was so tired of clicking my mouse by the end of this exercise! Click, click, click, yes, make these changes. 

Instead of putting myself down for not being very good at using commas or having spelling errors in my books, I was elated to have everything finally fixed! Now I can promote these two books with confidence that they are clean.

With the inside of the books clean as a whistle, it’s now time to switch to the covers…