Missing Post Two

And here is the second “missing post”.  This was something that was troubling me enormously as I was finishing the book and now, as I prepare to release it, it is frankly troubling me a great deal more…

Typos are becoming the bane of my existence and I fear that they are about to overshadow the release of a work I am really rather proud of, but the reason they will become such an issue is more bothersome than the actual errors themselves.

Let’s be clear, while I am not the world’s greatest wordsmith, I know my grammar and punctuation and I know how to smack the English language around sufficiently well enough to enable me to tell the tale I want to tell, but after the release of the first book, I got a frankly bewildering number of reviews on Amazon that banged on about spelling errors and grammatical mistakes rather than giving me feedback on my work.

I just do not bloody understand that.

Anyone who has read any of my work can see I am at least vaguely competent, you know?  I don’t do anything too awful, I don’t throw apostrophes and commas around like confetti and my narrative capabilities are, while still in development, a decent way above the thronging masses of the average eBook: indeed, having read a lot of the more recent and highly successful book series currently available, my opinion of my own writing actually went up!

My point here is that it is not a matter of me being too stupid to edit my own book, it is just a simple fact that typos and grammatical errors will happen in any work of any real length.  I could reach for any book from the shelf next to me, open to a random page and probably find something wrong there.  Hell, I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings that is the most recent edition and even it has errors in it, and that book has been through the hands of dozens of professional proofreaders.

“Well, why don’t you just get your book proofread?” the Amazon reviews cry: this annoys me even more!  I am selling a book for less than a bag of crisps and you are so incensed by me typing ‘form’ instead of ‘from’ that you are unable to continue?  I have to ask, with all due respect, what kind of nutter are you?  The Keepers of the Key is nearly 200,000 words long!  That is longer than The Deathly Hallows, for reference.  It is not a short book.  I have edited it dozens of times, but after a few reads, you go utterly word-blind to your own work and can only read what should be there, not what is there.  As to getting a professional proofreader to give it the once over, I think people are wildly deluded as to how simple that is, so let me offer some numbers.

A proofreader can proofread approximately 1000 words per hour (and that is proofread, not edit) at an average cost of somewhere between £20 and £30 per hour.  That means that The KotK would have cost me up to £5000 to be proofread and the KotF would cost me just shy of ten grand.  The absolute cheapest price I can find for the service is a “final polish” read-through that will only point out the most obvious of errors, and that would still cost nearly £2000.

I sold book one for 99 cents (69p) per copy and got 20% commission:  you do the math.

My point is this:  my first book had errors in.  My second book, I assure you, will have errors too, though none of them will disrupt your reading.  They are both big books.  They are both, in my humble opinion, worth both your time and the money I am asking for them.  Can we not just cut me a little slack, read on when you spot an error and enjoy the story?

177,781 – Part 3

A further pause in activity due to a week away followed by a birthday, all woven through with a massive amount of editing and some writing.

The new draft of The Keepers of the Key is about 50% done and I will have it finalised come the end of this week.  It contains no changes to the writing, just a brush and polish of what was already there (commas – why must you torment me so?!).  I’ll get it uploaded to Amazon and to smashwords so if anyone is mid-read, grab the new copy.

With that done, I will be diving back into the task of attracting a  publisher.  New synopsis is written, sample chapters are ready: I just need to draw up a list of prospective agencies and have at it again and nag the living hell our of everyone that bought the book to get a review written for me to add more fuel to my fire.  So few people have actually rated the book or left a review it is slightly worrying.  I am, however, choosing to believe that they simply forget and will leap eagerly to the task once I remind them!  Yes…