As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I had to delay the publication of my two books, Lost Mothers and Every New Beginning, because I got bogged down with the proofreading process. It simply took longer than I expected. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that that is still the case, and I am postponing publication again.
I enlisted the help of a friend, Linda, who is also a writer, with the second and third rounds of proofreading, and that worked out very well. Not just because she was saving me some time and effort, but because the books were new to her. Her eye was catching things that I was missing. Because I know the books so well and know what is supposed to be on the page, I wasn’t always seeing what was actually on the page. I mean, I misread Harford for Hartford three times. The other nice thing about Linda’s input was that on occasion she acted as a copy editor. She suggested a few commas and some mild sentence restructuring to help with comprehension. In a couple of those cases, I had written the sentence so that it would be read a certain way, but her changes made me see that no one else would read it that way. It would only look odd.
I have another round of corrections to do, for both the physical books and the Kindle versions. No actual proofreading this time. I’ll be checking the final proofs against this last set of changes–I’ve had to fill out a form, like the one pictured above, for each book and each round of proofreading–to make sure all of those changes have been made.
So the thing about proofreading, it takes longer than expected. And at some point you’re not going to be an effective proofreader because you know the text too well. And you have to accept that there will be a mistake or two that you missed.
The upshot of all of this is that the new publication date is May 1, 2016. Since I don’t have too many tasks left to do to prepare Lost Mothers and Every New Beginning for publication, I’ll be turning my attention to the next book that I will be reissuing—Tailor-Made, a Loveswept romance that was published in 1985. And that I wrote on a typewriter! The mechanics of the writing process were so very different then.
But there was always proofreading.