Mea Culpa

I don't know about the rest of you writers, but I hate reading my own stuff after it's published. No matter how good I thought it was at the time I wrote it, later on there are always things I wished I'd changed or tightened during the editing phase. I read somewhere that Nora Roberts feels the same way, so that puts me in pretty good company.

But the thing that bugs me the most about seeing my own work after it's published are the little errors that snuck in there without me noticing. The dropped hyphen, a spelling mistake, whatever.

Now, I don't know how it works in bigger houses, but my publisher is a small e-press and at the end of the day it's my responsibility to catch all the mistakes before the book goes to print. No one else's. Mine. I have to sign off on the final galley before I send it off to my editor, who in turn sends it to the production department. Yet somehow throughout the substantive and line edits, the galley proofs and the final read by the proofreading department, those little suckers still survive the red pen.

How is that possible? Well I'll tell you. By the time I've written the book, edited it before I submit it, then revise it with my editor and go through 2 galleys, I'm frankly sick of the thing in general. When I finally sign off on it, I've probably read through it at least seven or eight times, and usually at that point I never want to see it again, LOL.

Because I read the file so many times, it really irks me when mistakes make it into the final product. I've tried reading the book aloud, but that took me forever and gave me a really sore throat :) Plus I'm a workhorse, and usually sit all day and night in front of my computer to get through revisions/proofreads in a day or two at the latest. Yet no matter how many times I read the book some mistakes still make it through all those steps, and it's usually my hubby that points them out when he finally reads them (because he'll only read them once they "come out"). You'd think my laser-like glares would be enough to deter him from this practice, but...nope.

So with the last book I finished galleys for a few months back, I tried something recommended to me by another author I met at a conference. I started on the last page and worked backward. It was weird, but reading this way stopped my eyes from accidentally skipping over words, or jumping ahead to finish a sentence. I was much more focused on each word, searching for spelling errors/typos or sentences that didn't read right. I guess I'll find out in early December if it worked or not, because hubby is sure to tell me if anything slipped by me this time.

Any of you have other suggestions for proofreading or stories to share about it?