After writing your rough draft, your first draft (or however many other drafts there have been) and then doing a line edit and even hiring a line editor, the last thing you probably want to think about is whether you need a copy edit. 
“I’m sure I’ve caught everything by now,” you tell yourself. “I just don’t need a copy edit.”
Wrong.
For starters, you’ve now read your draft(s) so many times that you can’t see your mistakes anymore. Your brain is filling in missing words and mentally auto-correcting spelling mistakes. That’s assuming you’re actually seeing all the words and letters.
Don’t believe me? Then try this. Count the number of Fs in the sentence below.
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
If you’re like most people, you counted three Fs. But look again. There are actually six. See what I mean? The brain skips over the Fs in the word of.
You’ll also likely miss repetitions. Consider the following examples.
Anything wrong with them? No? Look again. In both cases, the word the has been repeated.
Now do you see why you might need a copy edit?
Let’s face it. The odds for being able to successfully copy edit your own work are against you, and some errors can be downright embarrassing. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve caught someone using the word pubic instead of public. If you’re still not convinced, check out the blog post below, written by my favorite book designer Lieve Maas of Bright Light Graphics, and you’ll see that even the pros can blow it in a downright distressing way when it comes to typos.
Have you come across any terrible typos? Let us know! And if you think you might need a copy editor, check out Step 4 of Incubation Press, my new self-publishing endeavor.
http://www.brightlightgraphics.com/2012/06/11/oh-no-a-typo/
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