Use the active voice in your writing. The active voice is writing sentences where the subject is doing the verb. An example is, "The child is eating the ice cream." with "child" as the subject and "eating" as the verb. A passive sentence is where the subject is acted on rather than acting. An example is "The ice cream is being eaten by the child." "Ice cream" is the subject that the child acts on instead of the child acting as an agent that moves the sentence. Active voice gives you a stronger sentence structure and narrative.
Do not use empty adverbs. "Incredibly," "amazingly", "surprisingly" et cetera are "trite." Use words that describe the object, for example, "The green swamp monster oozed layer after layer of mud from its pores and stepped out of the steaming goo." instead of "The horribly mangled monster charged after me."
Do not lecture your potential readers when you write a fiction book. Didactic writing in a fiction book creates a choppy narrative that interrupts the flow of a story. Save soap-box speeches for editorials and not for the story or the characters that you create.
Read your story out loud to yourself to see if the narrative is consistent. Throw out what sounds choppy or stilted. Reread your manuscript silently at least twice and rewrite that which gets in the way of the plot like lecturing passages or any inconsistencies in time.
Proofread your manuscript for grammar and spelling errors. Publishers will not consider you a serious writer if your document has grammatical and spelling errors. Check your book manuscript for these problems before sending the document to a publisher.
Format your manuscript for publication. Print standard manuscript format on 8.5 inches by 11 inches, 20-pound white bond paper. Use paragraph spacing of an inch on the top and bottom of the paper, and an inch or inch and a half on the sides. Double-space your text so the publisher can easily read your manuscript. Indent the paragraphs about half an inch. Use a monospace or sans-serif font like Courier. Use, while writing, a single space for every comma, semicolon and colon. Avoid widows and orphans paragraphs where the paragraph or sentence is split in two and flows to the next page.
Back up your manuscript to an external hard drive or burn two copies on CDs and store the CDs separately in two different places. Have two e-mail accounts and e-mail the manuscript to the other account. If you do not have external media or a separate e-mail account, print your document and keep this in a safe place.