Proof-reading is one of those things you either love or hate. I used to love it, but now I hate it. The reason I hate it is because it's so time-consuming, and that means time that could be spent writing. Yet it is essential both for coherency of the text and and also as a matter of respect to the reader. One day it might be possible for me to pay a professional to do this, but at around 2 cents per word we're talking thousands of dollars for most novels, this isn't viable at the moment.
I proof-read Razed 1 once, which was a mistake, and it got published with a few typos. The thing is, when you sell hundreds of copies of a book, as Razed 1 has already in just a few weeks, any typos are going to get noticed by a lot of people and commented on - and rightly so. The readers have paid to read a story and don't want it interrupted by stupid typos, even though they are an inherent feature of long texts. I recently read a novel professionally published by one of the Big Five publishing houses and I couldn't believe how many typos were in it.
With this in mind I'm now proof-reading Razed 2 for the third time, but I just know there are going to be typos lurking in it somewhere, like scorpions under your pillow just waiting to strike in the night. The benefit of reading your book so many times is you get to see other problems with it, such as character inconsistency or just plain old-fashioned mistakes in the story. Certainly juggling so many characters over such a broad canvas has been hard, and I have outlined a faster, simpler zombie novel that I expect to publish later in the year (one set purely in England) with this in mind.
As I have alluded to above, my sales are doing really well. I will get more specific about sales figures as time goes on, but for now suffice it to say I'm selling hundreds of copies and that's in just a few weeks (with many thousands of promo giveaways). This is great because I really love the scifi genre, especially dystopia, apocalypse and zombies, etc., so to be able to sell books writing about something I love rather than stuff you're writing just to make a dollar is really exciting and fun.
It does seem impossible to squeeze every last error out of a manuscript. A friend said it's the actual publishing process that introduces the errors. If you are printing physical copies, the number of errors introduced is proportional to the number of copies you order.
ReplyDeleteI've been doing a lot of proofreading lately in connection with Nepo Press. I have my own non-fiction eBooks about formatting eBooks for mobi and EPUB, and also some manuscripts for other Nepo Press books.
Our policy is that if any error is found on a proofreading pass, then there must be at least one more full proofreading. This can result in a LOT of proofreading passes. This is still no guarantee the very last error has been squeezed out.
I've tried proofreading various ways, including an HTML version in a web browser (our software creates an HTML version automatically at the same time it creates the mobi or EPUB file). My favorite, though, is to proofread on a Kindle Keyboard, where it is very easy to highlight the error.
Congratulations on your book sales!
That's an amazing proof-reading policy and I believe you when you say how much work it would demand. It's hard for a writer to proof-read his own work because he or she cannot help but get drawn into the "story behind the story" that put the words on the page, and then the mind wanders - and that's when the errors slip under the wire and get out into the world.
ReplyDeleteI've tried a few tricks as well, including enlarging the text to a ridiculous degree, but like you say - some always get through!