One of the few perks of being traditionally published is the copy editor: that overqualified, underpaid schlimazel who wades through your opus and heals its wounded spelling and tortured grammar with arcane runes. To my untutored eye, it always appeared that my lovingly-honed manuscripts had been vandalized into graffitied ruination. Yet lo! from those sullied pages sprang the pristine proof copies presented for my blessing. (“Presented” – UPS dropped a large lump off on my stoop. “Blessing” – I was not to “even think of changing anything—this horse has run.”)
I published Final Assault on Amazon’s Kindle on 12/18. By Christmas the alert had come: copy errors! Horrified, I saw with new eyes: it was true! Seizing the day, I spent the next 18 hours at battle stations, minutely going through it all again. Bowed and bloody-eyed, I at last uploaded the corrected file to Amazon. (Working through the festive day, I was accused of being the Grinch who stole the family Christmas. Humbug! My Whos are the first to complain when royalties to Whoville dip.) The book had been proofread by other eyes, but upon its return I made a few changes—nothing heavy. Then a few more, which lead to a few more. But of course I proofread all 70k words of an afternoon and then sent it on its way. (In traditional publishing, after suggested changes are made and approved, you must keep your fingers to yourself. This is good.) I’ve since armed myself with superb, complementary editing software, PerfectIt and Editor, most recently used for The Biofab War. Deployed with MS Word’s spelling checker, they catch most crap, except for missing quotation marks. (My staff are working on that.) Editor is an especially robust application and not for the impatient, but by carefully disarming some of its features, it morphs into your picky high school English teacher—the one who returned those slapdash essays topped with a blazing “See Me!” It’s only part mechanics: I’m very indebted to my volunteer proofreaders, who must surely have better things to do than wade through my stuff: Dale Bottrell, Tom Stronach and Shelly Kaidan-Berry. Off to write something new for them and you to read. Cheers 
February 14th, 2012 on 2:19 pm
Why thank you, kind sir, here if you need me…
February 17th, 2012 on 6:20 am
Good to know there is an app for that, I mean, software for proofreading. How annoying to get your work of genius out there, and then be made to look done because of a typo. Thanks for sharing the programs you use.
February 19th, 2012 on 8:10 pm
Thank you, Donna. It’s also a matter of economics: In the last 12 months I redid and republished my back list of four titles. Much retyping, some rewriting. The cost to have them professionally proofread would have been about $250 per book for a reliable job. It would’ve taken months to recoup that money. (I’m not Amanda.) Pity none of those packages check for open quotations, but they were written before the Indie writers’ boom. I’m told quotation marks’ checking is a reasonably straight-forward program to write, but given Microsoft’s cloistered development environment, hard to make work as an MS Word Add-In. (Very little information is Out There on how to create Add Ins.) I assume one of the existing proofreading software makers will eventually field an MS Word quotation-checking Add In as part of their existing suite. Certainly there’s a need for it. (PerfectIt would be the logical one to do it.) But not waiting for Godot, I’ve set my own software development team on it and she’ll be happy to perfect it and sell it herself, sans Add In.
One of my Twitter followers suggested, as a quality control for the final draft, having Adobe Reader read your work aloud to you. After we’ve plowed through our stuff 12 million times, our minds tend to ignore what our eyes see and supply the corrections to our brains without applying them to our work.
Thanks again for writing.
Best wishes,
Steve
March 15th, 2012 on 10:23 pm
Stephen,
I was mortified after I read the first printed edition of my book from CreateSpace. And now, even all the corrections, I still found the word "desert" instead of "dessert." Very humbling.
Thanks for the follow on Twitter and the fine post above, Sue.
March 16th, 2012 on 3:11 pm
Thank you, Sue.
Yes, it’s quite humbling, especially when kindly readers discreetly write you with a list of your misspellings and typos. The advantage of the ebook is that it can be quickly fixed and republished, with a new publication date and version/release number on the title page. It’s a fine line between pouring one’s time into search-and-destroy missions for a shrinking number of typos or getting on with the next project–which is where I’m at. (Now come the DMs listing the typos in the published books.
)
The brick wall of a restaurant in Pasadena, CA, for many years had painted on it: “‘My people are the people of the dessert.’ T.E. Lawrence”
Cheers,
Steve
March 23rd, 2012 on 10:27 am
I had three editors, and the text version of my novel still has errors. The Kindle version is better because it's easier to get changed. It's very embarrassing.
March 24th, 2012 on 11:27 am
Typos are vexing. I’ve even seen our friends at Big 6 missing more of late. Cleanup’s just a matter of dogged persistence. A Twitter follower suggested converting one’s book file to PDF and using ADOBE Voice to read it aloud–our eyes tend to miss much after reading the same sentences a few hundred times. But I doubt I could listen to even The Iliad in-rapid-robotic-monotone, let alone hundreds of thousands of words of my own stuff; a valid option, though not for the faint of heart.
April 3rd, 2012 on 8:52 pm
Thanks for a good laugh. I can relate all too well. I use grammarly, which is good, but tedious, and tends to pick up a lot of false positives. It seems nothing can replace the human eye.
June 2nd, 2012 on 11:50 am
Thank you, Peter! I apologize for only now replying–I cleverly turned off the automatic comments’ notification feature in my blog, which I otherwise visit annually around Christmas.
Yes, nothing replaces human eyes, though those eyes are expensive when you’ve got about 90k words. I may just have to sigh deeply and pony up the money for copy editing of my next book.
There is one writer I know of who has Adobe Voice read her novels to her, rightly noting that after you’ve looked at your own stuff five million times, your eyes supply the corrections without alerting your conscious mind. I don’t know about you, but the thought of my listening-to-my-words-streaming-in-an-endless-robotic-monotone is horrifying.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Again, apologies for my tardiness.
Best wishes,
Steve
May 2nd, 2012 on 4:24 pm
Dear Steve,
We just happened upon your generous comment about Editor in this post. I plan to quote it, with attribution, on our customers' comments page.
Editor does have a check for missing quotation marks, but its scope is limited to the paragraph. Starting when a paragraph begins, it keeps a count of double quotation marks and, if the count is odd at the paragraph's end, issues an "unbalanced quotation marks?" comment (first checking whether the next paragraph begins with a quotation mark, in case the writer has a continuing, multiple-paragraph quotation). In some cases, a missing quotation mark generates an "incorrect spacing" comment, because it guesses that the lonely mark belongs with either the preceding or the following word; the [i] Reference screen notes that this comment may be provoked by missing or unbalanced quotation marks. Some missing quotation marks generate both messages.
(Editor also keeps track of opening and closing parentheses and brackets, adding and subtracting as openings and closings occur and trying to ignore legitimate instances like 1), ii), A), and so forth.)
This is tricky stuff, to be sure. Editor cannot handle single quotation marks, because there's no principled way to distinguish them from apostrophes in the stripped-down plain-text memory image that Editor makes of a word-processor memory file to get rid of formatting codes, graphics, etc., before analyzing it, and because sloppy typing can pose problems that defeat our simple counting algorithms. If you find cases in your work where Editor trips up in finding missing quotation marks, and would kindly send us copies of the paragraphs where it happens, we will try to rectify the omissions and send you free upgrades when we do. Of course, we would treat any such material as strictly confidential.
Thanks again for the kind words.
May 19th, 2012 on 2:41 pm
Thank you, John. Feel free to use–Editor’s been a godsend.
I apologize for only now replying–my blog stopped sending me email notifications of comments. (Probably user error.
)
Best wishes,
Steve
June 2nd, 2012 on 9:41 pm
Editing is not my strong suit–thanks so much for the insight! I enjoyed your post, and I appreciate the Twitter follow!
June 2nd, 2012 on 10:24 pm
Mine neither.
Thanks for dropping by and commenting.