Thursday, September 2, 2010

Gone to Galley

Got my final edits done on "Blue Light Special" and now I have the galleys in hand. I always worry about proofing my own galleys. I've read the story over and over and over so many times that I wonder if I'm going to see what's actually there, or what I think is there.

It's so important to make sure errors are caught. Nothing turns me off more in a story than poor editing: typos, wrong word usage, etc. So it would be utterly ironic for me to have those problems in my own work.

For those of you who are published, do you proof your own galleys? If not, what other options do you use?

And for the readers, do you even notice poor editing? Does it matter a lot or not so much if a story has typos, etc.?

3 comments:

Clare Revell said...

i proofed my own galley on my novel. As it was the first time I'd seen it in pdf form - once i got over the fact my name was on the top of every other page - it wasn't too bad.

I literally took it line by line - found several things on the first read through. Few more on the second. I spent about a week doing it - my editor gave me 10 days.

But as i was working on something else in between edits, each time it was fresh, even if they were such old friends.

Megan Slayer said...

I notice poor editing and it drives me nuts. My favorite peeve is when a character changes names for a moment. I read something where the character was X all through until page efg and then X turned into Q for three paragraphs. Q turned back to X and all was well. Drove me berserk.

Mysti Holiday said...

Clare, I tend to try to get the entire thing done in one sitting... if I work on something else while proofing, I lose my train of thought.

Megan, I totally agree. I started a book once that had a wrong word used in the FIRST sentence. I thought, "If the editor and author missed THAT... right there at the beginning... they book must be horribly edited." And closed it.