Mea Culpa!! Forgive me, readers, for I have been blind and lazy. Oh, dear. I am thoroughly ashamed of myself! Yesterday I got another review complaining about mistakes. It suddenly occurred to me to do a check of the book I've just finished typing up in the Kindle previewer, so that I saw what readers saw. And you know what I saw - typos!! They jumped out at me. Lots of typos. Humbling, shaming, misery-making typos! So that means there probably ARE mistakes in the other books. And me a teacher! Me who writes to want-to be writers kindly pointing out that their manuscripts should be error free before submission. Me who puts red ink all over her student's essays.DOH!!
All I can say is writers heed this: there is a good reason why copy-editing costs money. It is a skilled art and I wish I could afford to have it done. It requires the kind of brain I don't have. The kind of brain that can do spreadsheets and use logic. Why is it, though, that I can look at a page of my own manuscript and happily read, 'the government were' with no flicker of an idea that it should be singular? Possibly because I'm thinking of the people in the government taking the action? But when I look at the same line in a Kindle viewer, I think, ah, that should be the government was. It's a mystery.
Ah well. As it happens I haven't got around to putting my notice about British English in front of the books that are already out there - I was too busy and happy working on my new Regency, but now it can't be avoided any longer. I'm going to take them all down, add that notice and check them page by page in the Kindle viewer.
So the moral of the story is check, check, and check again!!
So, if you are one of those people who wrote a review, THANK YOU!! I'm proof reading them all again. If you'd like a coupon for a free book, or if you'd like a signed paper copy, get in touch (with the name you used on the review) and I'll be happy to send a free book - you deserve it and thank you again.
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