Copyediting

Recently a reader reported this “distracting issue” in A BRIDE FOR MARCUS”. (see on the right.)

It was a missing full stop (or period if you’re American.)

Okay it was a pretty small error, but a couple of readers had contacted me saying they’d spotted a few mistakes in that book (though they didn’t say what), so I went through the manuscript again, and found a couple more small mistakes. I fixed them and then reloaded the e-book. (I can’t change anything on the print version.) But it was easier to spot the mistakes this time as it had been a long time since I’d reread A Bride for Marcus.

Copyediting is harder than many people think, especially for authors. There are two main types of editing — developmental editing, which is editing for plot, characters, story etc. The second type is copyediting,  which is editing for grammar and spelling, typos, missed words, characters whose eyes change color, and prose that’s awkward or confusing. (I blogged about editing before, if you’re interested.)

For me it’s the second type of editing that’s the hardest. My grammar is generally good, and so is my spelling (though I have to remember not to use Australian/English spelling for my books, since my main readership is in the USA. As well, my previous publisher was American, so I’m keeping the books consistent.)

But I’m a poor typist and I often make typos. Usually I spot them and correct them, but occasionally I’ll miss one or two. My trouble is, when I’ve finished writing a book, chances are I’ve also rewritten it or parts of it numerous times, and when it gets to that point, my brain sometimes reads what it thinks I’ve written, rather than what I’ve actually typed. Of course I’ll do a spell check. And Word flags words it thinks are wrong — BUT their suggestions are often wrong , sometimes badly wrong. 

When I was traditionally published, my books passed through the eyes of an editor, a copyeditor (and then came back to me) and then a proofreader. Even so, mistakes still slipped through. The most memorable was with  The Scoundrel’s Daughter. In it, I accidentally gave the Scottish nanny three different Mc names. I missed them, my editor missed them, the copyeditor missed them, and the proofreader, in the absolute final read-through, only picked up one of the three different names. 
Luckily I’d sent the manuscript to my friend Mary Jo Putney who spotted the different names and told me, just in time for me to notify my editor — the book was to go to print the very next day!

For my self-published books, I’ve employed two different so-called copyeditors, but neither one did a good job. One even did a bad job, inserting words that were plain wrong without telling me! So I’ve had to do most of the copyediting myself, with the assistance of some friends who offered to read the books and pointed out the odd mistake — thank goodness. 

I used to run every manuscript through a voice program, which read it back to me. That’s a great editing tool, and picks up all kinds of mistakes as well as word repetition and awkward phrasing. Unfortunately in the last update, the program now only reads back a paragraph at a time, which made it impossible. So now I’m on a search for a better voice program.

So while I do my very best to make my books error free, I hope you’ll forgive any small ones, or at least let me know so I can fix the e-books.