How to Hide Your Own Incompetence: Part 152

- Books

So, I’ve just finished the copyedits for Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. This is actually the first time the book has felt really real. Obviously it’s not laid out yet, or bound up in a cover or anything like that. It’s still a printed manuscript. But seeing it like that, covered in copyeditor and editor marks, with notations for the layout and so on, well, that basically says: this is going to be a real book. Everyone involved is acting like it’s going to be a real book. It’s not just in my head. A machine is in motion and it’s gaining momentum.

Anyway, that’s not what I was going to blog about. I was going to blog about copyediting.

This manuscript, this Secrets of the Dragon tomb has been read dozens and dozens of times. It has been read by me (over and over and over and over again), my critique partners, by Steph, by my agent and my editor. It’s been reworked and revised and polished repeatedly. So it should be good. It should be a shining jewel of sparkly unicorn-ness. Right?

Oh dear.

This, folks, is why we have the absolute lifesavers called copyeditors. These wonderful, lovely people seek out errors and inconsistencies like I seek out the last square of chocolate in the house.

Here are just a few of the errors that my lovely copyeditor picked up:

  1. I used two different names for the same character in the first two pages (oh, and since you ask, this is the version currently doing the rounds on international submissions…)
  2. I clearly have no idea how to use hyphens. Not the slightest idea. At least 90% of my hyphens were deleted by the end
  3. Similarly, me and commas have only the slightest acquaintance. Indeed, if we were at a ball in Regency England, we would need a third party to introduce us before we could properly speak to each other

And so on. That’s just the beginning of it.

I know not everyone goes through a traditional publisher when they put their book out. I know a lot of people self-publish (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; it works for a lot of people, and very well). But if you do, for all that’s holy, please, please do yourself a favour and employ a copyeditor, because no matter how well you thought you did it, you absolutely have to realise you are but a worthless worm of incompetence without them.

An aside (or a below)

You can now pre-order Secrets of the Dragon Tomb pretty much anywhere except Amazon.com (because they are being weird):

Indiebound | Books-a-Million | Powells | Amazon UK | Book Depository | Chapters Indigo