Editing is a Bitch!
OMG. What a process!
You read and re-read your pages over and over and your beta readers read them and you think: Okay, now at last I am ready to go..
You spring out into cyberspace and set your heart and your novel on your sleeve....and then you find errors. A couple of BIG errors (like the words in your title transposed!!) Arghh!!
Back to formatter---the sterling and wonderfully talented and patient Carol Webb of Bella Media Management and she makes the corrections.
Okay everything's good now. You go through and read your novel in book proof form....and find only a very few formatting errors.
But wait: There's more! What you find are continuity errors. Your Bad. Ohhh noooo. There's a sentence from a previous incarnation of the novel....it refers to nothing now and needs to be deleted.
Or you moved something from one day to the next---and are just noticing this now--and its kind of important to the timeline of your novel...(No no he's going to kill her today!! Not tomorrow!)or you find your brain wore out and you repeated a phrase three times in the same page....BORING...
So you send the proof back for correction....
You feel like an idiot.
And worse...you are beginning to feel sorry for any reader purchasing your novel and confused by your, well...confusion!!
Dang. Jane Austen made it look so easy!
Okay---seriously---I swear the book's a wonder to behold!! So purchase, enjoy and review!!!
You read and re-read your pages over and over and your beta readers read them and you think: Okay, now at last I am ready to go..
You spring out into cyberspace and set your heart and your novel on your sleeve....and then you find errors. A couple of BIG errors (like the words in your title transposed!!) Arghh!!
Back to formatter---the sterling and wonderfully talented and patient Carol Webb of Bella Media Management and she makes the corrections.
Okay everything's good now. You go through and read your novel in book proof form....and find only a very few formatting errors.
But wait: There's more! What you find are continuity errors. Your Bad. Ohhh noooo. There's a sentence from a previous incarnation of the novel....it refers to nothing now and needs to be deleted.
Or you moved something from one day to the next---and are just noticing this now--and its kind of important to the timeline of your novel...(No no he's going to kill her today!! Not tomorrow!)or you find your brain wore out and you repeated a phrase three times in the same page....BORING...
So you send the proof back for correction....
You feel like an idiot.
And worse...you are beginning to feel sorry for any reader purchasing your novel and confused by your, well...confusion!!
Dang. Jane Austen made it look so easy!
Okay---seriously---I swear the book's a wonder to behold!! So purchase, enjoy and review!!!
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Kim
(new)
Oct 05, 2013 04:29AM
It happens. Someone posted on a FB group asking how many typos did readers allow before throwing the book out. I had to giggle. Authors strive HARD for zero typos. But well, good luck!
reply
|
flag
Kim wrote: "It happens. Someone posted on a FB group asking how many typos did readers allow before throwing the book out. I had to giggle. Authors strive HARD for zero typos. But well, good luck!"Well, I must say, the second book Ive published "I Swear My Roommate is a Vampire" went a lot smoother. But then again it is only 92 pages and not over three hundred!!! (Still,it had typos a continuity glitch...but at least I caught them before it was uploaded to book form!)
My god! I laughed so hard reading your post Arabella, because it's so real! No matter how many times it's been edited, it seems as if errors/typos always sneak back in. I swear they wait till your back is turned (or maybe when you sleep at night) to crawl back in your manuscript and make themselves so comfortable that they are almost invisible. Well, at least until you finally spot them, then you feel as clumsy as if you were using a log instead of a toothpick. How can I miss that?! You just want to crawl under a rock and disappear. Argh! :P
It's scary how resilient errors are...and how well at camouflage!Sue
