Authors Electric

'Telling Tales' by Susan Price I was on the track down of an elusive and prolific beast -- one that's common but camouflages itself so well that you can be staring right at it and not see it. I knew that no matter how dedicatedly I hunted it, no matter how many hours or days I spent on the trail, I would miss many of the pestiferous things. So I asked my friend, Karen Bush,   an ex of this blog, to help and she bagged quite a few of the critters, having an expert eye for them. Using Karen's spotter notes, I culled all she discovered – but in the process found a whole lot more of the pests. They breed, I think, as soon as you turn a page. Because I'm talking about typos, of course. I've been proof-reading my latest self-published book, Telling Tales.   There are several breeds of typo. They can be mistaken spellings. I know to be wary of any word containing 'ie' or, indeed, 'ei' because I seem incapable of learning which way round they go in any...

I’ve worked in publishing for a long time now in various capacities. My first job was as desk editor for a small press in Gloucestershire - back in the days when galley proofs were still a thing, and my first job was proofreading medieval city records in Latin (letter by letter...). The company was leading the way in computer typesetting, but overall little had changed since Gutenberg.  Caxton's printing shop After a spell back in archaeology, I moved briefly into medical, then management publishing – where I learnt numerous buzzwords and reluctantly retailed the bulls**t beloved of that sector. Being pushed towards management didn’t appeal – neither wrangling staff nor overseeing the editing of magazines – so I moved back to what first drew me to the industry – working directly with collections of words that other people had lovingly crafted. Newly freelance, I targeted academic publishing companies as potential clients – that’s where I’d started and where I fe...

We all make them, don’t we? In that glorious rush to get words on paper fingers get muddled and our wisdom can emerge as gobbledegook. So we edit, edit, edit – honing our wonderful sentences until they say exactly what we want them to mean. Except sometimes they don’t. In our heads they are wonderful, because we see what we think we’ve written. But the reality can be wobbling tenses, repeated words words, missing punctuation so one sentence runs into another and the whole thing makes no sense at all and even speellings that hide in the sentence undergrowth and confuse here and hear. I know, you’ve read the thing six hundred times and are convinced that this time it’s perfect. And then along comes Nellie (probably aged about six, with a reading age of eight) and spots twelve mistakes in the first paragraph and it’s all you can do not to chew your own arm off with frustration because YOU ARE MEANT TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS STUFF! So – this is a plea – how do you spo...

Copy-editing is the thing I hate most about being an Independent Author. It’s a grinding, methodical task that takes a lot of time and concentration and it has to be absolutely perfect, because one of the main criticisms of Indie published books is the standard of proof-reading and copy-editing.  I’m still being sent books for review that are littered with typos, punctuation and formatting errors. I don’t want mine to be one of them, but my books simply don’t earn enough to pay a professional - for a full-length book it can be as much as £750.  I can’t afford that as well as the advice of a good structural editor - and the latter, for me, is of the utmost importance. I’ve been doing the copy-editing myself, reading and re-reading, but something always slips through and I hate it!  Your eyes see what they think should be there rather than what is actually there.  And then you die of shame as soon as it’s up there on Kindle and someone points out what you’ve misse...