Don't Ruin Your Book By Being Lazy

I don't know if it's hubris, but I don't understand why some self-published authors release a book that's riddled with typos. Maybe they're convinced their story is so great that readers won't care. Oh, plus laziness. 

To be clear, it's extremely rare to find a book that doesn't have any typos, even traditionally published ones. As time goes by, my ability to spot my own typos has deteriorated. You'll probably find one inside this post. My issue tends to be "missing words", especially conjunctions. I know what causes it--changing my mind about a sentence, backspacing to change the wording, then overlooking the fact that I didn't add an "and" or a "but". It's embarrassing. 

I was browsing the reviews on a book blogger's site, mostly because the reviewer had given Running From Herself five stars, and cynic that I am, I wondered if he gave every book five stars. (He doesn't, but he does bestow a lot of them.) I ran across a two-star review and was curious if the story was really that bad. No, it was the typos:

"...this has, by far, the worst proofreading of any. In fact, it feels like the book could have been written using speech to text and then the generated text was published without even looking at it based on a lot of the errors I saw, like constantly confusing the words passed and past or saying shes instead of she’s with apostrophes missing from words where they should be." 

This befuddles me. Does the author's writing software not have spellcheck? No, spellcheck wouldn't catch "passed" versus "past", because it's awfully dumb, but it certainly would flag words with missing apostrophes. I write on Word, because why spend money on a dedicated writing product when I'm already paying a subscription fee for Word? A lot of its spellcheck flags are annoying, because often when I click on the highlighted word, it tells me I should use something more "formal". Get outta here! Word has the audacity to critique my writing style. That's not why you're here! I could turn off the spellcheck function, but why risk missing something obvious?

But while writing software is great at catching misspellings, it can't solve my problem of "missing words". Hey, Microsoft, can't you read for context? 

Once I finish a manuscript, I go through many steps to ensure its readability. Naturally, I read it back several times, but that can be a double-edged sword. A writer grows so used to the story, she tends to overlook obvious errors. "Oh, I know what comes next. Let me move on to the next passage." 

The biggest help I've found is the text-to-read function. That can be frustrating to listen to, due to the annoying AI voice and lack of emphasis, but it definitely catches sentences that make no sense. "Wait--what? What did this woman just say?" 

But even with those two steps, somehow errors can get overlooked. I once found a completely wrong word choice on the very first page of my Amazon book preview, so I had to unpublish, fix it and upload the manuscript again. The word was a real word, so spellcheck didn't catch it; it was just the wrong word.

If, as an author, you're as obsessed as me with not making a fool of yourself, you run your manuscript through several rounds of proofreading. A little trick for that 50th round is to copy your doc and paste it into a new one, then change the font to one you're unused to seeing, such as Abadi, just to pick a random one. Too OCD? Well, I'd hate for a good story to be savaged in reviews for its needless typos.

The review I pasted above is such a needless waste. Maybe the story is great, but the author sabotaged himself by being lazy. Why toil away on a manuscript, then dump into KDP without even a cursory read-through? As a writer, I'm frustrated by that. Even if you can't pay for a proofreader (I can't), put forth the effort! Readers don't like being duped. They're spending actual money to buy your book. Or not--if they read the preview and find it riddled with mistakes. Bam! You've just lost a sale.

"Good enough" is not the standard. If you want to be taken seriously as an author, start by taking your work seriously. I hope when the author read the above review, he unpublished his book and fixed it. If not, then he published on a lark and doesn't care.

That ruins it for all of us.