One thing I know about myself is that I’m not a great copy editor. I’ve thought about paying for a copy editor, but right now I’m too far along in my book process to do that, so I have to make sure I’m doing the best job I can.
I’m currently reviewing galleys for my next book, due out in October: Critical State (Olivia Wolfe Book 1). It’s an exciting moment as I start a series that I have already blocked out the next two books for. But before I get ahead of myself, I need this book to get the final edit it deserves.
No cover yet, but this is the image for Critical State on my website for the moment!
I’ve already found a POV shift in a chapter that got a very late edit, so I know for a fact that I need to dig deep here. But I also need to learn new techniques to prevent those kinds of mistakes from making it that far into the process.
Ideally, I’d like to find things like that when I’m still in Scrivener, where I do my initial drafting. As I’ve written about before on this blog, in A Writing Tip Wednesday on reverse outlining, I use Scrivener and separate out each individual scene and tag it with the POV character. That’s where I should have caught that POV shift. But I’d “compiled” the book into Word because I find it easier to line edit in Word. I make myself go through the book in detail then have Word read the book aloud to me (a tedious process that catches a lot). I had done all of that but somehow still missed the POV shift.
The thing about catching these sorts of errors in galleys is that it’s a pain to manually fix them. You are also looking for wholly new kinds of errors, things like weird kerning or widows or orphans that the publisher’s book formatting software might have introduced.
Everyone hates making changes this late in the process–the author and the publisher–but errors still show up. It’s why we add the very direct disclaimer to Advance Reader Copies: this is an uncorrected proof. And yeah, it is definitely uncorrected. I’ll keep plowing ahead and trying to catch all the errors it would kill me to see in the printed paperback after publication. So I need to make sure this last edit is the final one!
Currently reading: The Paladin, David Ignatius, 2020.
Next in my TBR list: John Grisham, The Litigators, 2011
As Matt Cost posted yesterday, Maine Crime Wave is coming up, with an event at the Maine Historical Society the day of May 29th, a “Noir at the Bar” reading at Belleflower Brewing Company the evening of May 29th then the conference itself on May 30. All the information on tickets for the three events and the amazing team helping to put the conference on are here.
