I always sing author Quanie Miller‘s praises because she’s such an outstanding writer. In fact, I did a fun and interesting interview with her in 2013 about her premier book It Ain’t Easy Being Jazzy. As the owner of Proof Positive, I am proud to be featured on her blog with my guest post, “How (Not) to Write a Novel”. I’d love it if you comment and ask questions – I will answer every single one. Take advantage of some free advice from an expert editor!
editing
eBook Plague – Errors Aplenty
“Annoying.” “Very irritating.” These are just a couple of the most common descriptives readers are using when talking about their frustrations with the numerous errors in e-books.
These readers are asking Amazon and other e-book distributors for refunds without finishing the books….and they’re getting them. This should be Chapter 1 in the “Don’t Let This Happen To You” handbook for indie writers.
It’s such a prevalent problem that there are entire forum threads in which readers are complaining about this problem. To give you some idea of their feelings, one of those readers said, “I really believe that writers need to make an effort and deliver a product worthy of what we are paying for it.”
Another contributor voiced a similar feeling, which sums up the sentiments of most, “When I pay for a book, I want it to be done correctly.”
Yet another reader had great advice for writers, “Stand out in the crowd – make that effort, and give readers the best experience possible. They’ll thank you with repeat business and recommendations.”
Information like this is extremely valuable to indie authors because it gives us important insights into what readers want, don’t want, and won’t tolerate. And let’s face it – once you turn a reader off with so many errors that they can’t read on, they’re not likely to give your upcoming books a chance.
So how can an author produce the cleanest copy and best possible experience for his/her readers? Some rely on proofreading software, but that doesn’t always do the trick. Here’s why:
1. Much like spell checking tools, many times it will allow incorrect words to remain unquestioned because they’re spelled correctly.
2. It won’t always pick up repetitions of words or phrases and so many other things that require a trained human proofreading eye.
3. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scans are notorious for misreading certain letter combinations, especially in certain fonts: “th” can be misread as “til”, “1” instead of “i” or “l”, and “rn” is misread as “m”.
Rampant misspellings, punctuation errors, characterization problems (among the top three complaints), and spacing issues should all be corrected before you publish your book, especially if you introduce it through a limited time free offer – lots of readers take advantage of those offers, and word will quickly spread if they are annoyed by errors. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”.
Don’t take chances – nothing beats the accuracy of a sharp, trained, professional proofreader’s eye.
Hot Today, Cold Tamale…Another Menu Misspelling
Restaurant menus are fertile grounds for misspellings that are either funny or create double entendres. This one actually gave its customers the wrong impression, as the entire dish was hot:
So this hot dish has a chilled sauce? Interesting…. 😉
The funny thing is that “chili” was used in almost every dish on the menu, and it was correctly spelled everywhere else! Sometimes I think restaurant owners do these things on purpose just to give us a chuckle. 🙂
“Do You Pop Out At Parties?” And Other Odd Phrasings
Some of you will recognize the title quote, “Do you pop out at parties?”, from the classic TV show I Love Lucy. But to many others, it sounds like a terrible wardrobe malfunction. And that’s why it was a terrible advertising idea from a major women’s clothing company.
I’d love to have put the ad here, but copyright laws prohibit such things. And I doubt if the company would like me to mention their name in this context. But if you get their emails, you know who I’m talking about.
Here’s why that quote struck so many people so wrong.
The ad shows women posing in dresses – strapless dresses. So naturally, I assumed the company meant that they’d come out with something like a rubber strip at the top of the strapless dress to keep it from falling down. In fact, I was so sure that was what they meant that it took me a minute of further reading to realize that they were actually referring to color. Does the COLOR of your dress pop out at parties?
Wow. What a difference.
If that ad had been edited or proofread by someone who was removed from the situation (i.e. not their full-time style editor who already understood the context), this obvious misinterpretation would have been caught quickly and the whole thing would have been reworded.
Tuxedoed Writing
Will Rogers, Jr. once advised a fellow actor, “Don’t ever take a dramatic lesson. They will try to put your voice in a dinner jacket, and people like their hominy and grits in everyday clothes.” The actor – Dale Robertson – followed Rogers’s advice and became a highly successful television star.
This golden advice is similar for writers: don’t let writing classes, editors, or well-meaning critique groups dress your writing up so much that it’s no longer yours. Separate good advice that will benefit your story from advice that would change your voice, tone, or direction.
Without a doubt, writing classes and seminars can be beneficial, as can the opinions of friends and fellow writers. But opinions are just that – opinions. They’re not black and white formulas for writing success, they’re someone else’s personal ideas and preferences, and those may not necessarily be right for the story you had in mind.
Sometimes we writers tend to forget that helpful, well-meaning suggestions aren’t solid answers for writing a best seller, and we take them as hard facts rather than suggestions. I have a friend who belongs to an informal writing group that critiques each other’s works. She finds going to the monthly meetings helpful in keeping her on track with her writing commitment, which is great. But because there are a couple of published authors in the group, she takes their critiques as etched-in-stone fixes for her work, which they’re not. In fact, even though some of their suggestions are excellent, others were derailing her plot and changing her main character so much that she didn’t even recognize him anymore. She kept hitting walls and found that she couldn’t write about this new “stranger” in her novel. Had she tried to force her story out, it would have suffered and lost its authenticity. All those well-meant critiques would have turned her novel into everyone else’s novel. She finally realized that she had to back away from certain suggestions in order to move the story forward and keep it hers.
So weigh those well-intended suggestions and critiques objectively and see if they actually improve your story or if they’re just putting a dinner jacket on your words. Readers want authenticity – they can see right through the fake bow tie and tux; what they want is your style of everyday clothes.
How Many Bananas?
The saddest misprint is a huge misprint. I found this mistake on a huge banner at a picnic event, and the sentence above was, unfortunately, one of the selling points of the product. The “e” has been left off from the word “one”. It should read “More potassium than one banana”. When I read this sentence, I actually couldn’t figure out what it said at first and had to reread it a few times. What a shame to pay for a valuable piece of advertising without the benefit of having it proofread first!
Falling In Love Can Be Dangerous
As writers, we love what we do. Let’s face it – if we weren’t passionate about it, would we pour our hearts and souls onto page after page, into book after book, not knowing if anyone else will share our passion? Of course not.
We also tend to fall in love with our prose. Our phrasing, word choice, settings, and characters mean something to us and can weave their way into our hearts. While that’s a good thing in one way (after all, if we don’t love our work, who will?), it can be a drawback if an agent or editor recommends necessary modifications that our hearts aren’t willing to make.
I witnessed this first-hand a couple of years ago.
A fellow writer friend submitted her manuscript to an editor who had good connections to some promising agents. This editor had her finger firmly on the pulse of the publishing industry, so her input was extremely valuable, especially to a previously unpublished author. Her expertise and ability to connect writers with agents were reflected in her rates – she didn’t come cheap.
This writer decided that if she seriously wanted to get published “the old fashioned way” instead of indie publishing, it would be worth the editor’s fee. She submitted her manuscript and waited anxiously for its return so she could make her revisions and get her work between a couple of hard covers.
When the manuscript came back, she found more corrections, modifications, and recommendations for changes than she expected. Way more. She flew into a rage as she read through her edited work, accusing the editor of being “too nitpicky” and of trying to change her voice.
It wasn’t true. The editor was just doing her job, and she was doing it well. Those changes, suggestions, and recommendations were critical to the improvement of her book, but the writer didn’t want to hear it. She had fallen in love with her words to the point where she just couldn’t break up with them – she kept reading passages aloud and arguing that they couldn’t be changed without destroying the tone of her story.
In the end, her book never got published. She submitted it over and over to various agents and then directly to publishing houses with no success. While most sent generic rejection letters, a few agents took the time to give her basic reasons why the book wasn’t salable, and all of those reasons coincided with the editor’s edits.
Sometimes we writers have to face the emotionally difficult task of doing some tough surgical edits to improve our manuscripts. That writer’s beloved novel now sits in a bottom drawer collecting dust, whereas if she’d accepted a little “tough love”, she could already have been a household name.
Proofreading 101: The “Mined” Chicken Incident
Here’s a fun little typo from a restaurant menu – it insinuates that the chicken was actually mined, the way diamonds or gold would be.
Funny, I always thought that chickens were farmed, not mined! 😉 That proofreading error – “mined” instead of “minced” – flashed this image in my mind:
“Mined” chicken!
Another case where a detached second-party proofreader would have caught and eliminated the error!
Be Careful How You Flash Those Descriptives…
I was reading a take-out restaurant menu when I came across this description – look at the orange word on the first line:
“Homely” vegetarian food? In America, that would insinuate “plain, unattractive” food. I’m sure that’s not what they were inferring!
But in British English, that would mean “homey” food, like the kind of good home cookin’ grandma would make. In fact, “homely” does have a second, almost opposing American definition in Merriam Webster as “being something familiar with which one is at home”, but that’s a bit of a stretch for a menu listing.
You can see from this example how using a word that’s not quite right could stop readers in their tracks while they try to figure out what you’re saying. And that stops the flow of your story and can – if it happens frequently enough – stop them from reading your work altogether.
While “homely vegetables” might just cause a pause, a snicker, and a raised eyebrow, “homely” used in other less-than-ideal ways would lead to completely wrong impressions:
“She was thrilled with the homely gift he’d given her.” Any red-blooded American woman reading this would wonder why she didn’t kick him out the door!
“His hug gave her that homely feeling, and she knew she could spend the rest of her life with him.” Because “homely” is more commonly used in American language to mean unpleasant or unattractive, an American reader would wonder why an ugly feeling would make her want him at all.
So even though your word choice may be technically correct, it’s always best to think about how your readers will interpret your words. Then your concept and their interpretation will be in sync.