Humble Pie

No, this isn’t a story about my Thanksgiving feast. Although there was lots of good food–and dessert–no “humble pie” was served.

Nevertheless, I might have eaten a little bit of it, the night before.

We’ll start with this question for you, dear reader: How many times have you found yourself reading a book and *tsk-tsking* at the author for their poor proofreading? These indie writiers, you grumble judgmentally, don’t they even know basic English? To be fair, traditionally published books also have proofing errors.

It happens.

So, after announcing a publishing date and blithely giving my formatter the go-ahead, I received the ARC (advance reader copies) earlier in the week. These copies are meant for readers who read before the actual publishing date and post their reviews as soon as the book is released.

My daughter, a librarian, is one of those readers. On Monday night, she texted me: Mom, I’m finding errors in your book. It was late. I figured I’d call her in the morning. A quick text exchange the following day confirmed it and I contacted my formatter, Kat. Hold the presses! I sent the wrong file!

I spent most of the day frantically searching for the updated file. After several hours I realized–there wasn’t one. I only thought I’d done a final proofread and made corrections. By Wednesday morning I had proof-read the entire story and found more than a few errors. Late that afternoon I sent Kat the corrected file, with my profound apolgies.

All this is to say that, the next time I am tempted to judge a fellow writer for their poor grammatical and proofreading skills, I will give them a bit of grace.

Poor Kat is busy re-formatting, so of course we’ve had to push back the publishing date, now tentatively set for December 15.

Should I bite the bullet and hire a proofreader next time? I guess that remains to be seen. But one good thing about “humble pie”–it is totally calorie free.

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