Your Book Looks AMATEUR: The 5 Editing Checks You MUST Run Before KDP

About this video

Sponsored by ProWritingAid, Dale Roberts lays out five editing checks he says authors must run before publishing on KDP, ordered from common to catastrophic, arguing readers judge writing clarity and execution as much as ideas. He cites, as presented in the video, a 2025 study via the Association for Computational Linguistics analyzing Goodreads reviews, and a 2025 University of Florida/University College London study finding reading for pleasure has declined over 40 percent. The five checks, each demonstrated live in ProWritingAid: (1) slow flow/pacing from uniform or overlong sentences, fixed with the pacing report, rewriting a choppy John-entered-the-room paragraph into varied sentences; (2) awkward sentences that force rereading, fixed with the style report, cutting a bloated Maria-exhaustion sentence down to a direct version while rejecting some automated rephrases on taste; (3) repetition, using the All Repeats and Echoes reports to collapse a paragraph repeating ‘important/report’ into two clean sentences; (4) inconsistent tone shifting between formal and casual, which he says has no single dedicated tool and is best caught by text-to-speech or reading aloud, then unified — in his example toward the informal; and (5) confusing prose that stops readers entirely and risks DNF, diagnosed with the readability report and fixed by breaking a tangled proposal/deadline sentence into one clear sentence. He notes the free plan covers grammar/spelling, style, thesaurus, and limited reports on up to 500 words at a time.

Key takeaways

• Run five pre-publish checks in order: pacing/flow, awkward sentences, repetition, inconsistent tone, and confusing prose — the last is catastrophic because it stops readers and risks DNF
• Match the ProWritingAid report to the problem: pacing report for flow, style report for awkward sentences, All Repeats/Echoes for repetition, and readability report for confusing prose
• Catch inconsistent tone by ear — text-to-speech or reading aloud on a later pass — then rewrite all sentences to one register instead of mixing formal and casual
• Do not accept automated fixes blindly: Roberts repeatedly edits ProWritingAid’s rephrase suggestions himself to preserve meaning and voice
• Fix clarity by subtraction: his worked examples consistently cut filler, passive constructions, and tangled subordinate clauses down to shorter, varied, direct sentences

Episode details: published February 3, 2026 · 15:04 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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