It goes without saying that if one’s going to self-publish, you have to take extra care of making sure your manuscript is free of typos and errors. I mentioned in an earlier post some formatting problems that snuck out on the version that went live for the first 2 days (I say snuck out, but really, I just wasn’t looking). Those are easy to find and to fix.
But I’m continually finding little typos, about an average of one per two pages. Actually, my wife’s been finding them (I don’t see most of them anymore, I read what should be there, not what is there). The most infuriating one was on the very first page, in the second paragraph. The word completed was there instead of completely. Between Daniel and I, that first page must have been looked over a dozen times, and yet it was still there.
So, it annoys me that versions have been purchased with so many typos. When I look at samples of other self-published books, typos really stick out to me and seem unprofessional (especially grammatical mistakes, like you’re instead of your). If we’re going to be taken seriously as self published authors, we have to be more serious about the editing process. And I’ll be honest here, I rushed putting this book online because I wanted to see what happened. I had some free time left before going back to work and wanted to get it all put out then.
That said, what’s great about publishing an ebook is that the new version can be uploaded and available online in a matter of minutes. On Amazon, once a new version is uploaded, it seems to take about half and hour before it’s online, although from your dashboard you can’t adjust anything (I’m judging this by looking at when the sample changes).
When I thought that getting published the old fashioned way was the only way, it takes a little pressure of the author in terms of editing. Yes, you want to impress publishers with a polished manuscript, but it doesn’t need to be perfect because the version going public will be professionally edited over a period of many months by different people. Now an author just clicks a few buttons. Hopefully no one who purchased a typo-rife version of my book will make too many judgments on my writing, because, unfortunately, I know I would…
…oh, and by the way, I’m sure there are typos in this post. And the one in the title is deliberate.
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