I often barely edit my blog posts because my thoughts are ephemeral (fleeting) and because long before Donald Trump’s clumsy typos were panned by hoity-toity people I decided that the message not the syntax was more important. Being in a rush has always meant I sacrifice a few niceties like apostrophes in it’s which turns out to have been my most common mistake in the book Not your usual republican.
A few weeks I got a suggestion to find an editor by a self admitted “grammar nerd” who read about 35 pages into my book. By that time I had already ordered its printing but I still had to send the text to Kindle for their eBook and paperback versions. I was in the midst of finding someone to put it into shape for the Ebook (India is a hotbed of providers for such services). I had already failed once to do it on my own. So I decided to use one of the newer AI editors that had made an unbidden appearance on my computer to go through the book the night before I handed it off to my new found uploader. It was my 16 year old grandson who found the service for me which was worth a lot more than I paid for it.
So I discovered about 200 errors. Half of them were my failure to put an apostrophe in it’s. Half of them were capitalizations of family members Mom instead of mom etc. and a dozen were scrambled hyphenated words like Onceupon-a-time. (as an example)
I fixed every one of them and then lost the corrected doc. So, I was very pleased last night to get an offer from someone who just finished my book to proofread it for future editions. I’ll show you my emailed reply to him momentarily…..but first my Brother texted me this morning. He finished reading the book a couple days ago. I asked him if he had noticed many of my mistakes and he said maybe it could have used a couple of commas but that he hadn’t noticed them. That was a relief. I wrote him back, “Commas are a bitch.”
Here’s the reply I sent to the gentleman who offered to proofread my book:
XXX
Thank you.
Proofing the darn book was a major occupation of mine and I was doing it as I was trying to publish it, start a campaign and figure out how to use AI editing.
I discovered and corrected a great many its/it’s switches, unneccesay capitizations of relative titles and several mixed up hyphenated words and one i before e except after c mistake. Then I was unable to put those corrections online at Kindle.
Corrections at Amazon/Kindle can be edited at any time after they are put on market meaning now. In fact. Amazon can print and ship paperbacks cheaper than I can from Duluth. I just ordered one of theirs to compare them and there’s not much difference in quality. Nothing can be done with my 1st 500 books but the online fixes would show up as soon as they are cleaned up and uploaded.
Anytime you would like to have at it I would be delighted.
Do you need the original docs to more easily edit? Your kind offer is very generous.
Harry
