“You get what you pay for.”‘ says the old adage. Yep, you do. Well I’m cheap and I admit it. I love “FREE” Kindle books. I download them every chance I get.
In the last two days I’ve downloaded three. Two of them I will never read, ever. My brain couldn’t get past the misspellings, grammatical and punctuation errors. I kept re-writing the sentences in my mind so that they made sense. It was grueling.
My question becomes “Why don’t you take the time to edit?” Obviously authors have taken the time to gather the information, research the facts (which with grammar, punctuation and spelling errors make the whole book suspect) and the time to write and assemble the book, get a great book cover, have it formatted, etc., but editing falls through the cracks.
As an author assistant my first question is “Has your book been edited?” or “Do you have an editor in mind?” In my opinion you need to do the editing process as follows with every book:
1. Edit – find an editor in your genre first and foremost
2. Review and revise – make the changes as suggested by the editor
3. Edit – return it to the editor for another round of editing
4. Review and revise – make any additional changes
5. Proofread – not just you as the author, but have at least two more sets of eyes review the final manuscript
6. Interior formatted – and then review and proofread at least two more times
I can’t tell how many times I’ve helped authors through this entire step-by-step process only to find typos, misspellings, grammar and punctuation errors in the final PRINTED book. I don’t believe you can eliminate every error but you should strive to come as close as possible to an error free book. You can always clean it up in a next revised version if it truly bugs you.
My initial rant started because it wasn’t just a “few” errors, there was a plethora of all of the errors in just about every single paragraph. Once I started reading I quickly lost interest, felt my intelligence had been somehow insulted and found myself truly frustrated because I actually wasted my precious time to download these books only find the author’s lacked the professionalism to turn out a viable book for their audience. Good thing these books were “free”. If they ever get listed as bargain priced at $0.99 they simply will not sell. Someone, not me, will put up a review and the author’s future ability to sell any books will be thoroughly trashed.
Final thought – please edit, proofread, edit, review and proofread again for your sake, your credibility and for your future books and readership.
#fortheloveofediting