I'm embarrassed, mortified, humbled and generally red in the face. Over the past while, several of my readers have gently let me know that they had seen a few mistakes/typos in my book. I say "gently" let me know because I have had to really drag that news out of them. A couple have said that they didn't want to embarrass me by telling me..... Au contraire, I've told them, I NEED TO KNOW.
You see, I have always prided myself on my error-free, completely proofread, clean as a whistle, documentation. (My background in the legal profession taught me the hard way about mistakes in documents.) I have always considered myself a proofreader extraordinaire.
Until today. My good friend and sister-in-law is one of my readers who mentioned that she had found a few errors. I asked her to point them out to me yesterday when she was visiting and she said that it would take too much time as there were quite a few. I think I mentally passed out when I thought I heard her say there were about 60. The power of denial......until today. She dropped the book off with her "gentle" notations in the margin. There were more than 60 notations. YIKES.
Thank you my friend. I corrected 55 mistakes which consisted of: typos, words missing, words in the wrong order, misspelled words, etc., etc. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Humbled I am because until today I was quite a snob when it came to reading other's books. In fact, there have been times that I've been so disgusted to find a mistake in someone's book that I have trouble continuing to read it.
Smashwords, the electronic publisher of my book (http://www.smashwords.com/) sent out an email a few nights ago letting all of its authors know that they have inked a deal with Barnes & Noble to have our books sold through their website. Imagine how excited I am. There are a few provisos though, one of which is that our books have to "pass muster" to be listed at Barnes & Noble. Right away I decided I needed to clean up the book because as I mentioned above, a few people said they had found some mistakes. I immediately started reading/proofreading the book again (for about the tenth time, seriously). And then I got the mark up from my friend and realized I am a TERRIBLE proofreader of my own work. Because although I had just read the first 110 pages, I had missed over ten mistakes!
So, what's the value of a good copy editor? I'm not sure how much they charge, but believe me, I will be seeking out and hiring one for my next book (and maybe for this one as well, before I do another print run).
I second you about the value of a good copy editor and/or proofreader! And I would even if I weren't one. :-)
ReplyDeleteYou're not alone in your difficulty in proofreading your own work. No one should rely on their own proofreading; one sees what one *expects* to see, what one intended to write.
I enjoyed your post, your writing style. Oh, and I noticed your post about your birthday: mine is August 19. :-)
Susan Sheppard
Copyeditor / Proofreader
http://www.linkedin.com/in/proofreadcopyedit
http://wordsright.blogspot.com/
(BTW, should I tell you that there's a typo in the first paragraph of the post? A couple have said...)
Susan: thanks for the comments and thanks for zeroing in on the problem of proofreading my own work - I "see what I expect to see". Maybe that's working in my favour right now with others who are reading the book and swear they haven't noticed any mistakes.
ReplyDeletep.s. have fixed the "typo" in the first paragraph ... LOL