After you have perfected your manuscript, and it is as perfectly wonderful as you can make it, it is time for some new eyes. Yours are probably a bit blood shot by now. You have read your manuscript a hundred times. It gets to the point where you are really not reading it anymore, you have it memorized.

Our brains are very conservative. We can not possibly process the enormous amount of data our world presents to us every second of the day. Our brains only process what is necessary. When you walk into a familiar room your brain doesn't process all of the data available - it has done so before. Your brain looks for differences, changes from the last time you were there. That is why, searching for your keys, you can look right at something and never see it. Someone else looks and laughs. "If it had been a snake it would have bit you."

Your manuscript is like that familiar room. You wrote it, you edited it, your brain knows it. Your eyes can see "he" and your brain can process "she". It knows the story, knows that you meant to type she, and corrects. So consciously you miss the typo. Every time you pass over the printed mistake reinforces the mental correction. You never see it.

In "How to Get a Literary Agent", author Michael Larsen gives three tips for proof reading your manuscript. His first suggestion, "Try proofreading your manuscript backwards so you will proof the manuscript, not read it." That forces your brain to process each word. That will catch a lot of common mistakes, but you still may miss the "he" mentioned above because you are not processing the context of the word's placement. There is only so much a writer can do alone.

There is also more to polishing your manuscript than fixing typos and misspellings. The is also consistency, clarity, and a host of other things to check. As the writer you know the plot, the characters, the whole manuscript better than anyone: better than what is actually written. What may seem obviously apparent to you may be mysterious to the reader. You know unstated background and motives, plot twists and details, that may need to be written out for the reader.

It is time to let the baby leave the nest. Someone else needs to read and critique your masterpiece. A fresh pair of eyes. Print it up and give it to friends and family. Be ready for good and bad reviews and be ready to make revisions. Then expand your circle to people you don't know. Find a crit group, have those you gave the manuscript to pass it on to someone else.

When I first started I thought what I wrote needed to be locked away until it was sent to a publisher. I thought once it was out in the public it was used, done, unpublishable. In reality the opposite is true. Agents, editors, and publishers want to know what others think about your work. They know you love it and assume your friends and family will say they love it too. They know you need some unbiased, honest criticism: theirs shouldn't be the first you get.

Ebooks are exploding on the Internet. Anyone who can manage some basic HTML can publish one. After you have gone through all of your available reader/critics you can upload you manuscript to the net and see how it does. You can give it away free or even sell it, that is up to you. You can even put an email link at the end and ask readers to provide feedback.

I was worried that publishing an eBook might hurt your chances with traditional publishers so I asked Michael Larsen, a top Literary Agent and best selling author, "Is a manuscript salable after it has been published as an eBook?" and "Would a successful eBook make a manuscript more or less desirable to publishers."

His response, "Yes, if you sell enough copies of your ebook, at a good velocity, then yes, publishers will come after you and propose publication. This is a great way to test market your book and your idea."

Mr. Larsen is the co-founder of Larsen/Pomada Literary Agency, a very prestigious agency located in San Francisco, California. He is also the author of How to Get a Literary Agent, co-founder of the San Francisco Writers Conference, and a member of the Association of Author's Representatives.

One concern when test marketing your manuscript through ePublishing is your Intellectual Property Rights. Be very careful that you retain all rights to your work. You can't sell what you don't own. I use Mobipocket Books. Their agreement is a straightforward, non-exclusive right to sell the files you publish. They don't tie up your rights so you are free to publish your work elsewhere, sell to a publisher, or even publish with other online vendors.

There are "ePublishers" who will prep and publish your manuscript as an eBook for you, but they are expensive or tie up your rights while offering small royalties. If you want to test market your manuscript as an eBook it is best to do it yourself. It is easy to be your own publisher online.

In the past, many authors have paid to have a limited run of books printed to help test market their work. Today, with a little Internet savvy, you can test market your manuscript and maybe even make a little money along the way, while you wait on your best seller to be published.

Maxwell Cynn