Getting your book right

Once I made the decision to publish The Octogenarian Ski-jumper myself, I took on all those tasks that a publisher would normally do. I'm going to leave aside any discussions about what publishers actually do and don't do with respect to books, since I'm not experienced in that area. But the key point is that most self-publishing routes require you, as the author, to do a lot more work. Now as a writer you have been doing the writing, and it is fair to assume that you are close to happy with the content of your book. But there's a lot more things to do before the book can be considered publishable.
I've touched on a couple of these items in earlier posts. In one I described the frontmatter - all those things that a printed book contains that aren't the actual contents - things like a title page, the copyright page, a table of contents, and lists of illustrations if you have them. In another I described how to use the features of Microsoft Word 2007, specifically Microsoft Word 2007 sections, to get a professional appearance for pages by using headers and footers.
But the most important thing is to get the content right. Are you the sort of person who gets annoyed by misprints, poor formatting, or inconsistencies in what you read? Even if you aren't, many of your readers will be. And an unsatisfied read is a LOT less likely to pass on a recommendation about your book to a friend.
The first thing you should do is to spellcheck your book. But I stress, this is only the first thing you should do. Spellchecking software will find some errors, but will also report 'false positives' where it indicates that a word isn't in its dictionary. If your book is a novel that deals with the modern day, you won't have too many of these: but if you write science fiction, say, or technical terms, or have a lot of foreign words, your spellchecker will highlight a lot of words as wrong when they aren't. You can usually add words to your spellchecker's dictionary, which goes some way towards solving a problem.
More serious than that are the things the spellchecker misses. Consider the two phrases:

• There is a French window in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects
• There is a French widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects

A spellchecker won't save you from embarrassment here. (Incidentally, that delightful second line with its second meaning arising from one missing letter comes from the late and great Gerard Hoffnung, in a sketch he wrote about mistranslations.)
In a future post I'll be addressing how to overcome some of the problems that the spellchecker can't handle.