I just finished my second official edit of my novel and I thought I’d pass along the experience. We’ve all heard the various ways you should edit your book:
1) wait a month and read it fresh.
2) change the font and read it fresh.
3) Read it out loud and hear it fresh.
The common theme? Reading it fresh, or differently than you are used to. So here’s a new one:
4) publish it to your Kindle Fire and read it fresh!
If you go to your amazon account and click “manage my kindle”, you’ll see a section for personal documents. Somewhere in the settings you can specify what email addresses can send documents to your amazon account. There are better resources on how to do the exact steps, but in a nutshell you:
1) save-as your document to “stripped html” or (in office 2011 for mac) just html.
2) send it to <emailaddress@kindle.com>
3) publish to kindle
Once it arrives on your kindle you can read it as an ebook. The best part is: while you are reading it, you can add notes DIRECTLY ON YOUR KINDLE. You can highlight bad sections with “the the” or “your” when it should be “you’re”, etc. etc. After re-reading your book and editing it up, you can easily go through it note by note and put it all back in your document.
That’s what I did this weekend.
Quick notes:
1) publishing to your kindle costs like 2 bucks (or something, very cheap)
2) you can also do this on your other kindle devices (it’s just easier on the Kindle Fire).
3) I’m guessing you can do it on other ebook readers, but that’s just a big fat guess, now ain’t it?
John L. Monk 
John, the first thing I sent to me first Kindle, years ago, was my own manuscript. Looks like a real book when it shows up in a Kindle. Warning: never turn on the audio. Hearing a computerized voice reading my novel was so depressing I almost strangled it (the novel!).
But you mean the formatted, with a cover and table of contents, publishing-ready version? I haven’t tackled the TOC thing. Or the cover. But the first Kindle was a great way to catch fubar formatting issues. Tab stops, paragraph returns. The hard part is cleaning it up in the MS.
Why would it cost $2? I sent unpublished novels all the time to my first Kindle – that’s how I read so many novels for Internet Writing Workshop. The editing/highlighting and note-writing feature was very cumbersome. Even with Kindle Fire, note taking and commenting can be time-consuming. But I love the share feature! Post comments straight to the amazon site, Twitter, Facebook. Only works with published novels, and only if they’re not locked. I love seeing the excerpts other readers have posted.
Carol, if you are using “whispernet” then you pay to have it delivered because whispernet uses the telephone system. If you are using wi-fi, you’re set. Whispernet came with the original kindle.
I don’t put the TOC in when I mail it to myself for reading — but I do play it back via audio sometimes. Good way to catch errors.
🙂