The Biggest Mistake I Made When Self-Publishing My First Book. By a Professional Proofreader.6/22/2023 When I self-published my first-ever book, Pop Art Poems: The Music of The Jam, back in summer 2016, I was not yet a professional writer, proofreader, and editor. I didn’t see this as a problem and decided to go it alone, doing pretty much everything except physically printing the books.
As a result, I made mistakes. On the one hand, that’s okay because if you never make a mistake, you never learn anything — and I did eventually sell the 1,000 copies I ordered, making a profit and getting some good reviews despite minimum marketing. On the other hand, it meant that the book I’d spent four years working on wasn’t as good as it could have been. There were some glaring errors, and it took a lot of work to correct them for the second edition, which I self-published through Amazon’s KDP platform five years later. My biggest mistake by far in self-publishing was not employing a proofreader who understood grammar more than I did at the time (I worked full-time in the pub trade back then, more used to changing barrels than correcting comma splices). As a result, I spent a lot of money on 1,000 books that contained multiple typos and formatting errors. I remember reading it through for the first time and each fresh mistake feeling like a gut punch. There was no way I could alter any of it, either; I had to go out and sell something I knew was flawed. I’d worked on this book for four years and fallen at the final, pretty low hurdle. At the very least, I wish I’d hired a professional to act as a fresh pair of eyes. So why didn’t I use a proofreader? Looking back, I think there were three main reasons: 1. Pride I knew I was a good writer — I had a first-class degree, after all — what could a proofreader have taught me about writing? This is clearly not a healthy approach. Even if you’re self-publishing, it still takes a village to make your book as brilliant as possible, and a sensitive proofreader or editor can help you achieve that by noticing typos or suggesting subtle changes you might have missed because you’ve gone through your manuscript so many times that you’re no longer seeing it objectively. 2. Money My manuscript was roughly 100,000 words and would have cost a few hundred quid to proofread. Looking back, given how much I was prepared to spend on printing and getting permission to use the picture I wanted for the front cover, adding, say, £500 to the initial outlay should have been a no-brainer, but I picked this crucial area to cut corners on. As I had a degree and was good at spelling, I figured that a thorough check with Word’s spellcheck tool would sieve out any mistakes. It didn’t, and that’s the main reason I can’t look at first editions of the first book I ever wrote. 3. Panic For reasons I’ll save for another blog, I rushed the self-publishing process, going from finishing the second draft to having physical copies in my spare room in a matter of weeks. On reflection, this was unnecessary. At the time, I had no concept of proofreading turnaround times (today, I could proofread a book of a similar length with a similar amount of errors in around 10 days), and to delay publication by any length of time would, I felt, have ruined years of research and writing. As it happened, the opposite was true: the rushing ruined it. So, in conclusion, I encourage — no, I implore you to employ a proofreader for your book, blog, website, course, or script. Yes, I do so because I’m a professional proofreader, but I also write as a fellow author who ultimately let his work down by not giving it that final polish. Got something that you think would benefit from a proofread? Get in touch with me at [email protected]. I can’t wait to hear about your project!
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AuthorI'm a writer and editor from Birmingham. Nothing fancy about that! Archives
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