The Same Words, Over and Over, or why you need to be your own best editor

Reviews are for readers.  Writers should be readers.

Of course, not all readers are writers, but a sojourn into the swamp that is author-published genre fiction quickly makes one believe that many writers are not readers.

I often ask myself what attraction does writing have for a person who doesn't read?  Is it the prospect of easy wealth?  Fame?  The easy wealth thing is easily (pun intended) dispelled: Writing a book isn't easy and too few writers achieve great wealth.  Fame?  How many really famous writers are there?

Maybe some of these non-reading writers have read a book or two, enjoyed it, and thought they could do the same.  If they don't understand the basic structure of fiction, the rules of writing, the elements of style (without capitals), it's not likely that they will enjoy much success in the way of wealth and/or fame.  Those skills have to be learned, and they have to be learned through reading until they become a part of who and what the writer is.  It's not enough to lean on your middle school classroom writing exercises.  They may have taught you the rudiments of grammar and punctuation, but the writing of successful popular fiction requires much more than knowing when to use a comma and when to use a semi-colon.

Nor is it enough to rely on an editor.  If you don't have the requisite skills yourself, you won't be able to recognize their lack when you hand your book over to someone who claims to be an editor.

It doesn't matter what the editor's credentials are.  They may be a retired English teacher or a multi-published author.  What matters is your ability to determine if their editing will make your novel better or worse.

Let's look at the opening paragraph to one book as an example.  Even though we don't have the original text and can't see what the editor has changed, if anything, we can at least look at the final (?) result.

The book in question is Not in the Cards by Amy Cissell, published by the author in October 2018.

And we know this book has been edited because the author made sure to thank the editor!

Special thanks to my editor, Colleen Vanderlinden and my cover artist Daqri Combs for helping put together such a polished book. No woman is an island, and a writer is nothing without a great editor and fantastic cover artist.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 66-67). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Disclosure:  I obtained my copy of Not in the Cards when it was offered as a free Kindle book on Amazon on 21 June 2021.  I do not know the author nor have I ever communicated with her in any way about this book or any other matter.  I am an author of historical romance, contemporary romantic suspense, and assorted non-fiction.

Now, about that opening paragraph:

Sandy unlocked the front door to the little shop she’d just rented and pulled the string on the sign that hung in the window, the sign that had brought her here— to this shop, to this business, and to Oracle Bay. The buzz of the neon broke the near silence. She walked outside to look in at her shop. From the outside, the windows appeared to have been cleaned with shortening. A large triangle of yellow neon framed the words “Alexandra’s Tarot Readings.” A red Eye of Horus and the outline of three cards took turns blinking on and off at the top of the triangle.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 76-80). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

As a reader, I came to the first line and saw Sandy walking up to the door from the outside.  I don't yet have any mental image of her or of Oracle Bay, but I do see her approaching the door from the outside.  She unlocks the door, walks in, and turns on the sign.

The "walks in" isn't stated, but I inferred it because that's the scenario my years of reading have prepared me for.  So when Sandy instead walks outside in the third sentence, I have to adjust my mental images.  It takes a tiny bit of effort to do that and settle into the new scene of Sandy standing outside, perhaps on a sidewalk, looking into her new shop.

I could understand the sign having brought her to the shop, but did the sign in the shop in Oracle Bay bring her to Oracle Bay?  I'm already figuratively scratching my head.  

She pulled a string, so now I'm envisioning a swinging sign, perhaps wooden, perhaps cardboard, that hangs in the window.  I have to alter that image when the author informs me it's a neon sign.  Now I think maybe "cord" would have been a better word than string, to indicate she's turned on a switch of some kind for this electric sign.

Then comes that third sentence where I realize she's been inside and walks outside.  Instead of additional information being revealed with each subsequent sentence to clarify an established mental image, the narrative keeps changing what the previous text has implied.

If the windows looked like they'd been "cleaned with shortening," are they cleaned at all?  Wouldn't "smeared" be a better term?  Are they  just dull or do they look greasy and dirty?  Shop windows that are made of acrylic sheets -- Plexiglas (r) and other trade names -- can easily be scratched when cleaned with anything abrasive and over time become dull and lose some of their transparency.  But that wouldn't make them look "cleaned with shortening."  Would it?

That description interrupts further description of the neon sign, again disrupting the flow of the text.

After just one paragraph, I'm having doubts about the qualifications of the editor.

Now, before you jump all over me for being picky, let me clearly state that yes, I am very picky.  And yes, it's possible for a writer to become very successful without my suggestions!  If you as that writer, however, aren't as successful as you'd like to be, maybe stop and step back from the emotional reaction to my criticism and look at the work -- it's not yours, after all -- objectively.

Did the editor make Not in the Cards so much better that there weren't obvious weaknesses?  Even if we don't know what the original version was, is this the best it can be?

The next two paragraphs are backstory, narrative explanations of how Sandy came to be here outside the shop.  I had some issues with the phrases "it'd belonged to" and "Sandy'd made" because I thought "it had belonged to" and "Sandy had made" would have flowed more smoothly, but they weren't big issues.

Then came 

She turned the sign back off, opened a bottle of wine, and grabbed the cheese and cracker plate she’d picked up at the local supermarket. She made herself a floor picnic, complete with a couple candles to help add light to the dim room, and toasted herself and her newfound freedom.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 87-89). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Wait, what?  When did Sandy go back inside the shop?  We left her standing on the sidewalk, but there isn't a single word about her going back inside.  Did she have to open the door again?  Why did she go out in the first place?

Was the action of going outside just a device for the author to introduce the sign?

An editor or even a good critique partner could/should have caught that.  It's not a major thing in and of itself, but an author should be able to make sure the characters' actions are fully and clearly understood.  I stopped reading when I came to that fourth paragraph and went back to carefully reread the preceding three to see if there was any mention of Sandy returning to the interior of the shop.  

There wasn't.

Interestingly enough, a few pages later, Sandy does the outside-and-back-in-again routine, but it's spelled out.

She walked outside and watched [the sign] cycle through its neon advertisement a couple times before shrugging. [Did the sign shrug?] It was what it was, and there was no going back now. 

Sandy went back inside, pulled a book out of her expansive beaded hemp purse, and sat down to wait for her first customer.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 114-116). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In due course, Sandy's first customer arrives.

Her breath caught in her throat as the woman paused

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 121). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The woman paused and squinted

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 122). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 the woman took a tentative step

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 125). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 the woman jumped

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 127). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the woman instinctively grabbed

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 128). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The woman blinked

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 129). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

 The woman hesitated

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 133-134). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

note of the woman’s name.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 135-136). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

The woman did as requested,

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 139). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

the woman sitting

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 139-140). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

This woman was

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 142). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

the woman as she drew

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 143). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

the woman asked.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 149). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

Did you keep track?  If not, it's thirteen times in less than four pages that the client is referred to as "the woman."  Only once is she called a customer and one more time a client, as well as a few times by her name, which Sandy has learned is Ann.  The rest of the time she is "the woman."

Is this wrong?  No, not really.  But it isn't good.  It isn't polished and professional and evocative.  As a reader or as a writer, can you think of other words that might have been used?  Customer and client are valid possibilities, and each was used once.  What about "stranger"?  "Visitor"?  "Guest"?  Any others?

But the multiple repetitions of one word are only one thing that's awkward -- I'm trying to avoid saying "wrong" -- about this scene of Sandy welcoming her first paying customer.

Ann isn't her first customer.

Remember how the previous scene ended?   Sandy goes outside, comes back in, and waits for her first customer.  It's normal to assume, then that the woman who walks in the door in the very next paragraph is in fact that first customer.

Sandy prepares to do the tarot card reading for Ann, but in the midst of those preparations, we get this:

The clients who’d come in earlier that day had all been vacationers looking for some happy news.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Location 142). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Wait, what?  

The mental sequence of Sandy settling down to wait for her first customer, reading a romance novel while waiting, and then greeting the woman who walked through the door as her first customer probably should have been revised.  The story action isn't flowing smoothly.  It's been interrupted by the reader questioning what she's already read.

Could the editor have suggested that Sandy reflect on her first couple of clients as being vacationers and that this tarot-reading gig was going to be a lucrative cinch before Ann comes in?  Well, if I were the editor, I certainly would have.  As a reader I noticed the bumpy sequence right away.  

Do most readers notice things like this?  To be perfectly honest, probably not.  If you look at the reviews and ratings author-published genre fiction gets on Amazon and Goodreads, the numbers skew very high.  Few of these novels average less than 4.0 stars, and the one- and two-star ratings are few and far between.  Is that because the books are so good?  Or is it because over the past few years negative reviews and their writers have been so often attacked?  Is it because positive reviews are encouraged?  Do readers who have negative reading experiences resist writing reviews because there are so many pressures not to?

One of the most common and most vociferously argued is "Don't write a negative review unless you've read the whole book."  And if the book is so bad you can't finish it, writing a review saying so is therefore strongly discouraged.  Result: badly written books don't get negative reviews.  Subsequent result: authors of badly written books don't improve because they don't know their books are badly written.  Or, in some cases, badly edited.

(As an experiment, look at some of the reviewers on Goodreads who don't leave reviews but post five-star ratings.  How many of them have very high average ratings, 4.5 and above?)

To continue.  The first chapter of Not in the Cards contains two detailed tarot readings, one that Sandy does for her paying customer Ann and another she does for herself.  Tarot cards aren't all the same; today there are dozens, maybe hundreds of different decks featuring themes such as dragons and witches, angels and fairies, dogs and kittens, and in styles such as Native American, feminist, pagan, and so on.  To someone even slightly familiar with the Tarot, the lack of description of the deck used and especially of the individual cards that turned up in Sandy's readings was noticeable.  

Sandy is apparently using "her old college tarot cards" (Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 83-84). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.)  Nothing between that statement and her ushering Ann in for a reading suggests Sandy has obtained any other tarot deck.  So the reader doesn't know if the deck Sandy obtained in college is the familiar Rider-Waite deck or some other.

The reader is also assumed to be familiar with the cards and with the whole method of tarot divination.  None of that is given the slightest explanation in the text.

For instance:  What does it mean when a card is reversed?  What is the Celtic cross layout?  What does The World card look like?  What does The Fool card signify?  What are pentacles and cups, wands and swords and rods?  (I assume she meant rods and wands to be interchangeable, but I don't know for sure.)  A novel doesn't have to give all the details, but it should give . . . some.

I managed to get through the first full chapter but wasn't enticed to read further.  There were other minor issues that bothered me in addition to those cited above.  The one that stood out most was Ann described as 

her skin was the rich shade of brown.

Cissell, Amy. Not in the Cards (An Oracle Bay Novel Book 1) (Kindle Locations 123-124). Broken World Publishing. Kindle Edition.

"The" rich shade of brown?  Is there only one?

I can overlook the occasional punctuation/capitalization/grammar error, but things like that pull me right smack dab out of the story into  "Huh? Ugh!" territory.

Not in the Cards was published in 2018 but only has 26 reviews on Amazon, and 64 ratings on Goodreads.  When it was offered free on 21 June 2021, it shot up to #20 in the Kindle Free listings, so it will be interesting to see how many reviews it picks up on both Amazon and Goodreads as a result.

 

 

 

Edit, editing, edited: Do you even know what the words mean?

Warning and disclaimer:

This is a rant.  It is an angry rant that may be filled with "bad" words. 

IF YOU ARE A SELF-PUBLISHED WRITER WHO HAS HAD NEGATIVE REVIEWS BECAUSE READERS HAVE SAID YOUR BOOK CONTAINED MISSPELLINGS, PUNCTUATION ERRORS, WORDS USED INCORRECTLY, OR NEEDED EDITING, PLEASE PUT ON YOUR BIG GIRL PANTIES BEFORE READING.


I've written before about there being a difference between proofreading and editing.  Let me explain it again.

Proofreading generally is intended to fix errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and word usage.  In other words, errors on a micro level of writing mechanics.

A proofreader may -- but may not -- correct errors of grammar such as replacing "had went" with "had gone" or "several ladys's coats" with "several ladies' coats."  A proofreader may -- but may not -- correct errors such as a character's name changing from Harry to Woodrow in the middle of Chapter 3 or point out that the hero has brown eyes in the prologue and blue in the middle of the opening scene.  A proofreader will probably not tell you that your scene set on the corner of Dearborn and LaSalle in Chicago violates the known cartography of the city because Dearborn and LaSalle run parallel to each other.  A proofreader will almost certainly not correct historical inaccuracies nor inform you that the character on page 75 who is sharing a carriage with the heroine had in fact been killed on page 62.

A proofreader is not an editor, and proofreading is not editing.

How difficult is this to understand?

A proofreader is not an editor, and proofreading is not editing.

Allow me to illustrate:

Thomasina watched out the window in the front door until her mother and brother had went, then she locked the door. Now that the confrontation was over, she gave in to the overwhelming weighth of stress. Much as she wanted to follow commonsense and secured the locks on the back door, she stumbled only as far as the stairway. Her knees were weak, her head ached, and she feared she would collapse in hysterical tears if she didn't give herself a receipt.

She sank down onto the bottom stair and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, forehead on her upturned palms.

"I should of stayed in Seattle," She lamented aloud, but even as the echoes faded in the stillness, a shivery tightening in her stomach reminded her that if she had not came back to Ridgewood, to the confrontations with her family and questions of the House, to the enduring and now pressing mystery of her Father's death, she would of never re-established contact with Steve Angelotti.

She took a deep and calming breath and tilted her head back, then to each side, stretching the taunt muscles in her neck and shoulders. Whatever the problems, the decision to return to Ridgewood were her own to make. 

She was hungry, too.  A glance at her watch told her it was nearly half past seven, her sandwich and salad lunch with Steve was hours ago. But as she glanced down the hall toward the kitchen, she wondered how she would ever keep anything on a stomach as knotted as her's was right now.

Let's try that again:

Thomasina watched out the window in the front door until her mother and brother had gone, then she locked the door. Now that the confrontation was over, she gave in to the overwhelming weight of stress. Much as she wanted to follow common sense and secure the locks on the back door, she stumbled only as far as the stairway. Her knees were weak, her head ached, and she feared she would collapse in hysterical tears if she didn't give herself a respite.

She sank down onto the bottom stair and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, forehead on her upturned palms.

"I should have stayed in Seattle," she lamented aloud, but even as the echoes faded in the stillness, a shivery tightening in her stomach reminded her that if she had not come back to Ridgewood, to the confrontations with her family and questions of the House, to the enduring and now pressing mystery of her father's death, she would have never re-established contact with Steve Angelotti.

She took a deep and calming breath and tilted her head back, then to each side, stretching the taut muscles in her neck and shoulders. Whatever the problems, the decision to return to Ridgewood was her own to make. 

She was hungry, too.  A glance at her watch told her it was nearly half past seven; her sandwich and salad lunch with Steve was hours ago. But as she glanced down the hall toward the kitchen, she wondered how she would ever keep anything on a stomach as knotted as hers was right now.

If you don't know what the mistakes were and couldn't correct them by yourself, you need a proofreader.

A proofreader, however, will not fix bad writing, poor story construction, lackluster characterization, static description, research errors, implausible motivation, impossible logic, or any of the other macro level problems that beset far too many self-published works.

If all you've done is hire someone to clean up the punctuation and spelling, DO NOT claim that you've had the book edited.

The above selection is from a contemporary gothic romance I'm writing titled The Looking-Glass Portrait.  I had to create the errors in the first sample so there would be something to fix, and then, by the goddess, I fixed the errors.

If the person you hire doesn't, can't, or won't correct all of your grammar and syntax errors, they haven't done any editing, and they haven't even done a competent job of proofreading.



Here's a brief passage from Leah Banicki's Seeing the Elephant originally published in 2011:

Corinne stands waiting in her Aunt's fashionable 12th street Boston home. The walls gilded in pinks and golds. The chandelier weeps with great drops of crystal. This place doesn't look like a prison, but Corinne lost her freedom the moment she tied her first whalebone corset around her petite frame.

Banicki, Leah. Seeing the Elephant (Wildflowers) (p. 5). Smashwords. Kindle Edition.

The book received some nice reviews on Amazon, but also some very harsh criticism for the poor grammar, especially the shifts in tenses.

Today -- 4 December 2012 -- the revised version of that book was free on Amazon, with a new cover, a new title, and an announcement from the author that it's been revised, rewritten, and "professionally edited."

Here's that same passage from Finding Her Way, the revised version published 27 October 2012:

Corinne waited in her Aunt's fashionable 12th street Boston home. The walls gilded in pinks and golds, great drops of crystal cascaded from the chandeliers, the grand staircase wrapped elegantly around the back and majestically descended into the great hall. Halfway down the stairs there was a great view of the parlor on one side and the ballroom on the other. Artisans from Italy and France laid the exquisite marble floor. The fireplaces designed by a famous stonemason, the iron grates, and tools imported from the best artists and craftsmen from around the world. Few houses in Boston could boast of finer rooms or impressive displays of wealth. It had been a long while since it even fazed Corinne. This place did not look like a prison, but Corinne had lost her freedom a few years ago when she tied her first whalebone corset around her petite frame. The grandeur came at a price.

Banicki, Leah (2012-10-27). Finding Her Way (Wildflowers) (Kindle Locations 150-171). . Kindle Edition.

The segment has quite obviously been rewritten and expanded. The mix of present and past tenses has been fixed. But "Aunt's" should not have been capitalized in the first section and that error wasn't fixed in the rewrite. The Boston address of "12th Street" should have been capitalized, and that error wasn't fixed either. The short incomplete sentence about the walls in the first passage was expanded for the second, but it remains an incomplete sentence, sort of, but mixed with others to make a ghastly run-on sentence.  The second highlighted description is a similar combination of fragments and comma splices. The use of the word "impressive" is incorrect, since the sentence structure implies "few houses in Boston could boast of impressive displays of wealth." Should the word "more" have been inserted? I don't know. All I know is that in this single paragraph there is more than enough evidence to show me this book was not "edited." It wasn't even proofread very well.

I've said often enough that I'm not going to do book reviews here on this blog, but I have to say I'm sorely tempted right now. Except that there is no way I could even begin to read, let alone review, this book without indulging in some very heavy critiquing. The opening is all tell, no show. There is a major historical error on the opening page. There are still words being used inaccurately.

Is it an improvement over the first version? Yeah, I guess so. But it hasn't been edited. And that's the point I'm trying to make. I'm sure Leah Banicki won't read this. I'm sure dozens of other self-publishing writers who are paying for "editing" services won't read this either. They'll go into denial, they'll insist there are no errors, they'll call me a hater or a jealous competitor or something. And they will never admit that they screwed up. They will never admit their stories are flawed, their writing is inadequate, their research is flimsy, their characters are wooden/TSTL/whatever. Most important, they will insist until the cows come home that the book must be absolutely flawless because they've had it "professionally edited."

Except they haven't. They don't even know what the word means.

Which of these words don't you understand?

As often happens, reading someone else's writing sparks my own thoughts, and I suppose that's not unusual in a community of writers and readers.  Writers were, after all, readers first and still read.  Readers read what the writers have written.  There will always be cross-pollination.

So I'm going to start this rant with a link to Sunita's original blogpost here which was further disseminated via Dear Author here and explain that the subject is titled (by my predecessors, not I) "When I bought your book, I didn't sign up to be your beta reader."


I added several posts of my own to the Dear Author thread, so I'll only briefly here restate that I think it is very wrong for authors who are digitally self-publishing to engage in this particular practice, which consists of:

1. E-publishing an uncorrected, unedited, unproofread rough draft of their "book" and charging cash money for it, without noting in a prominent way so the reader is aware before purchasing that it is in fact a rough (or very early) draft.

2.  Revising said work based on reviews and/or comments made by people who have purchased said work, such revisions to include but not be limited to fixing typos and other mechanical errors, revising plot lines to improve logical progression, altering characters and/or character motivation, changing the ending to make it more popular with readers, adding or removing significant events from the story.

3.  Re-publishing the work as a new edition and charging new readers for the privilege, with or without notifying previous purchasers that a new edition is available.


Those are the basics.  There are other corollary things the author can do to make the experience even worse, but those will wait for later enumeration.

I'm also going to offer a couple of qualifiers to the three main points, one of which has already been mentioned in #1.

If the author makes it clear that the publication is a work in progress that's one thing.  Then the reader knows that she should not be expecting a polished product.  It's probably still bad form to do this, but at least the author is being honest and the reader can make an informed decision whether to buy or not.

Offering the work for free is not an excuse.  Again, if the author makes clear that the work is unpolished, that's one thing, but merely offering it at no charge without such an announcement is unfair to the reader.  The reader expects that the product, free or not, is finished.  A rough draft is not a finished product.

I can't stress this enough.  The reader buys expecting a finished product, ready to read, to all intents and purposes it's DONE.  In essence, it's ready to provide a reading experience in which the text becomes invisible (see my blogpost about invisible words here) and the reader is immersed in the story.

But what appears to be happening more and more often is that the reader buys something that's not finished.

Here's a review of The Duke's Reform by Fenella J. Miller, in which the reviewer laments:

Spoiler alert: I hate to write a bad review so I will start out with the good. This was a good story. Could have been a much better story. It was poorly told, punctuation and vocabulary and missing words and words added in that did not relate to the sentence they were in combined to make this a very difficult read. When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

. . .

This could have been a good read if only they had had an editor. The Kindle version has some serious formatting problems with new paragraphs beginning in the middle of sentences, some paragraphs in bold and other in italics for no apparent reason. Commas and other punctuation are just, willy nilly throughout the book. A stilted and unbelievable dialogue. I wanted to like both the H and the h. I really did.

I am left wondering why I read this book to the end except that, I really wanted to like the H and h and I wanted them to have an HEA.

But if you must, get a dictionary and keep it handy, you will need it. This is a long read and by the end I just wanted it to be over

Then there's The Taming of the Hart by Lorraine Burgess which was uploaded to Amazon sometime prior to 22 June 2012 based on the date of the earliest review.  Selected comments from the reviews:

Didn't anyone take a look at this book before it was uploaded to Amazon? This is a good story. It deserves better.

I don't only not recommend it, I caution against it because it literally gave me a headache while trying to read it.

Please use a proper dictionary and check the spelling of even small words like seem and such. It is a large hindrance when the technical parts of writing get in the way of the story.

A few days later the author issued an apology and stated this was her uncorrected version written for herself and she would have a corrected version uploaded "within 24 hours."  Three days later, that corrected version has not yet appeared.



As you can see even in this not-very-clear screen shot, the version Ms. Burgess uploaded contains errors in the very first sentence.  The bold italic font continues through the entire text, sometimes Times Roman, sometimes Arial or a similar sans-serif font.  She claims this uncorrected version was uploaded "by accident," and it's obvious from the text of her apology that she's still having problems with spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation.  None of her friends told her of the problems, which suggests either her friends never looked at it or they weren't skilled enough to recognize them or they chose not to tell her; but none of those explanations explains why she herself didn't take even the quickest glance at what she uploaded.

When she did upload a "revised" version a few days later, most of the problems remained.  A few of the usage and spelling errors were fixed, and it's no longer in Italic font but the bold text continues throughout and it's a mess.  It's a horrible mess.

Now, allow me to throw this out here:  Yes, I uploaded a slightly imperfect version of Firefly to Amazon, an error I related here, and had I purchased a copy and checked it all out, I probably would have discovered the problem.  However, I did at least make sure I hadn't uploaded a version that contained numerous spelling errors.  I also made sure the version that was uploaded was reasonably well formatted, and in fact on my Kindle for PC app, the font was a standard Times Roman, not "ugly courier" noted in the early reviews.  The courier font and font-related glitches only appeared, as far as I'm able to determine, on the actual Kindle device.  It did take some extra finagling for me to get the right version to show up on the Kindle, but at least I did check somewhat before I put the thing live.  Yes, I could have checked more, but as I have learned since then, even purchasing a copy might not have revealed all the problems.

And regardless, I would never have uploaded something that had such appalling errors as "belt of lightening."  Come to think of it, I would never write "belt of lightening" when I really meant "bolt of lightning" in the first place.  My fingers wouldn't let me.

Sometimes these books have many, many, many five-star reviews that rave about how wonderful the book is and how the reviewers just can't wait for the author's next book.  There may be a few that point out errors and only grant one or two stars, but frequently the author (or their surrogates???) counter these negative reviews with staunch defenses of the wonderfulness of the story, or they attack the reviewer personally.  Often the errors cited are never addressed, or even admitted to.  It's as if the authors are in absolute denial of the problems in their books.

When I did my original analysis of self-published books that had garnered a bunch of five star as well as one star reviews, I was specifically looking for titles that had both because I wanted to try to get some sense of whether the five-star reviews had any suspicion of being planted by friends, family members, the authors themselves, or "shills" who were actually paid to write glowing reports whether they had liked or even read the book or not.  As I expanded my data base (if you will) of these titles, I did indeed begin to see a pattern with the works that were original to the digital self-publishing platform.  In other words, the books by authors who had never published in print prior to uploading their books to Amazon.  (And of course the qualifier here is that I had not looked at any other e-publishing format.  More about that later.)

Secrets of Moonshine, by Denise Daisy is one of those books with a lot of five-star reviews but is still very badly formatted.  Although the author claims she paid an "editor" $900 to turn this into a "squeaky clean" product, typos and punctuation and syntax errors abound.  I feel like telling Ms. Daisy it wouldn't have mattered to me if she had paid $9,000 or even ninety million dollars for that editing job: The book remained a pathetic mess.  Telling the reader that it was edited does not make it so.

Asking -- or worse, expecting -- the reader to fix the errors is grossly unfair.  Remember what that reviewer of Fenella Miller's The Duke's Reform wrote:  When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

It is the author's job to tell that story.  That is what the reader has paid the author to do, with payment being made sometimes in cash but always in time and in trust.

Many years ago, in an article published in Writer's Digest magazine, authors George Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and John Ashmead reiterated what they called "The Ultimate Rule," which was an expansion on instructions laid out by Robert Heinlein.  I personally took that Rule to heart, and I have passed it along, always with attribution, to every aspiring writer I have ever come into contact with.

1.  You must write.
2.  You must finish what you write.
3.  You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4.  You must put your work in front of an editor who might buy it.
5.  You must keep it on the market until it is sold.

Obviously, with the rise of digital publishing, #4 and #5 are no longer as "ultimate" as they used to be.  And given how my attitude toward traditional publishers has soured, I'd have issues with those orders anyway.

But how does Heinlein's dictum apply to today's publishing scene? 

First of all, #3 specifically refers to the traditional publishing professional who, as the middleman between writer and reader, is trained to acquire those properties most likely to turn a profit for the publisher and is trained to put those properties into publishable shape.  Unlike the random reader who looks at the free sample of a book digitally published on Amazon and who may or may not know anything at all about writing, about editing, or about the factual accuracy of the book and whose suggestions may be completely wrong, at least under the traditional publishing model the editor is probably going to do much more to improve the work than make it worse.  What the shift to digital self-publishing has done is to split the gatekeeper function from that of purchaser by eliminating that editorial middleman.  And that means that the author must now take full responsibility for all of that editorial function, while purchasing is directly in the hands of the final user.

Second of all. Heinlein's #3 never meant the author should complete the roughest of first drafts and immediately start schlepping it around to the top editors and agents.  It does mean that when you have a clean and polished version of your work, stop messing with it and get it out there.  It does mean that you need to develop the professional writing skills that will allow your prospective reader -- whether that is an agent, a publishing house editor, a small e-press editor, or the person who downloads your digital book from Amazon -- to read your story as if it were ready to be set in type.  It does mean only listen to the complaints and criticisms and orders from those who are competent to voice and demand them.

Third of all, the writer must understand what #4 really means in the age of digital publishing.  Again, that "editor" now becomes any potential reader, and just as the traditional publishing industry demanded that the author deliver a manuscript as spotless as possible when trying to land an editor, today the digital shopper fills that role, not as editor but as acquirer.  The author must take on the responsibility that formerly fell to the publisher: making certain that the product is ready for the consumer to use.

Unfortunately, so many of the people putting out digital books are so lacking in even basic writing skills that they should never get past #1.  And they don't understand that #2 doesn't just mean writing "The End" after the first draft is cranked out.  "Finished" means ready for real people to read it.

Essentially, self-publishing means that the author has to take on all the roles of the publisher, and that doesn't mean foisting them off on an unsuspecting and perhaps unqualified reader.  The author must either be qualified to be editor, proofreader, copyeditor, line editor, cover artist, publicist, accountant, and legal specialist, or she must find and pay other professionals to perform those tasks.  Self-publishing is not just uploading a text file to Amazon or Pub-it or Smashwords. 

Nor should self-publishing be a vehicle for authorial deception.  We've already seen too many instances of authors just plain stealing other people's words and trying to sell them.  Whether it's Janet Dailey or Cassie Edwards, Cassandra Clare or anyone else, plagiarism/copyright infringement is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.  No excuse, no defense, no forgiveness.

But also wrong is this ongoing business of posting deceptive reviews to self-published books.  The reader who browses the Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Kobo or Apple catalogue should not be bombarded with bullshit "reviews" that are nothing but the author's friends and family members and paid ad copy writers posing as unbiased reviewers.  Of course your mother is going to give you a good review!  We know that.  As readers, we want to know what other real readers thought. 

However, some authors are now turning to another tactic, and it's not being done to make their books better but rather just to sell them.

Among the intial group of novels I analyzed back in March was one that, as I began to read the free sample, struck me as having enormous potential to be a really, really good book.  Unfortunately, it was riddled with errors of just about every type: typos, wrong words used, historical inaccuracy, bad formatting.  And I noticed that while there were a whole bunch of kind of generic five-star reviews, there were also a lot of one- and two-star reviews that cited those problems. 

Now, if I were an author whose book received numerous detailed criticisms about specific errors, I'd be sure to consider those issues very carefully, research to find out if perhaps the critics were right, and then I would do my very best to fix them.  And as a matter of fact, the few reviews I've received on Firefly have brought up the issue of that Arizona ice cream -- but there's nothing historically wrong with it!  And I addressed that in the Afterword.  No, of course Del and Julie didn't take Willy to the local Baskin Robbins or Coldstone Creamery, but ice cream was not anachronism.

What I wouldn't do, however, is ignore a slew of criticisms and just remove the book from Amazon, then republish it as is on Smashwords, with a new title and a new pseudonym, with no reference to the original on Amazon and no correction of the errrors, which is what I discovered the author had done.  I only noticed it because she republished her book almost the same time I published Shadows by Starlight at Smashwords, and I saw hers as I was checking the status of mine. 

When an author does something like that, at that point the whole operation becomes nothing but deception and a ploy to make money off the gullible.  That, too, is wrong.  It's even more wrong when she chooses a title identical to that of another historical romance and a pseudonym very very similar to that of the author of that book.

Once again, self-publishing means the writer takes on the responsibility of fulfilling all the tasks traditional publishers would have done.  As far as I know, that never included making the reader do the work or intentionally deceiving the reader.

Now, self-publishing authors, what about this don't you get?

New words, old words, different words -- Editing vs. Proofreading

The past couple of weeks I've been working on minor edits and revisions to one of my previously print published books with the intention of putting a digital version up on Amazon.  Because the current digital file was spliced together from a variety of sources, I knew it would have to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything was as clean as possible before I began the actual conversion and then publication.

It's a tedious process.  The story is familiar and I know what I want to have written, so it's easy to see what should be there instead of what is there. 

It's also a complex process, because editing is not the same thing as proofreading.  As I found out when talking to a friend about it the other night, not everyone understands that difference.

Proofreading is a very simple, uncontroversial task.  The proofreader goes through the manuscript carefully looking for typographical errors, word usage errors, punctuation errors, grammatical mistakes, and other mechanical errors (and sometimes, but not always, ambiguities).  The proofreader does not look for factual errors, internal inconsistencies, or plot holes.

Here's a hypothetical segment from a hypothetical novel:

"Your not going to wear that dress are you"? Caitlin asked in exaxperation.

"I'll wear whatever I want to wear.  It's my party, not your's so don't tell me what I can and can't wear to it."  her younger sister declaired.

The two girls faced each other across the expance of the bed upon which the garment in question was spread in all it's crimson glory.

"Your just jealous," Vanessa said, "Because Mama made you wear pink for you birthday ball."

The older girl leaned to her left and punked her sister with her elbow.

A proofreader will fix the you/your/you're/yours errors, correct the punctuation and spelling, and will maybe ask if that "punked" should have been either "punched" or "poked" instead.  But there's no guarantee on that last one, because "punked" is a real word and maybe that's what the author intended to use.

A proofreader probably will not ask the author, "If the girls are on opposite sides of the bed, how did Caitlin poke Vanessa?"

That's a task for an editor.

From what I can tell, most of the "editing" that's done on self-published digital novels these days is proofreading, not editing.  (And frankly, some of the proofreading doesn't appear to be top-notch either.)

What an editor -- a good one, that is -- will do is spot the structural and composition errors and help the author turn the sow's ear of a rough draft into a final silk purse.  An editor looks at the whole package of the novel; the proofreader deals with the minute details of individual words and rarely looks at anything larger than a sentence.

A good proofreader can clean up a novel, even a messy one, in a day or two.  And when she's done, she's done.  Proofreading does not require the author to make any major changes to her work.  She in fact has asked the proofreader to fix mistakes, and that's it.  The proofreader's service is to correct errors; her job is not to make suggestions that the author has the option of following or not following.  Maybe she charges $100 or $300, but when she completes the task, she hands the manuscript -- or digital file -- back to the author and that's it.  Her job is done.

An editor's job is far more complex and if done properly, editing is process that involves both the author and the editor in at least some back-and-forth exchange involving creative issues of story-building and story-telling.  These issues may be as minor as changing the spelling of a character's name so it's more recognizable to the reader or as major as altering the ending.

Here's another example, again a very hypothetical passage from a hypothetical novel:

Jessikah stood in the cabin's doorway and looked around.  She saw a plain room with a fireplace and some furniture.  It was empty.

She closed the door.  She wondered if the roof leaked.  She was already wet from the storm.  She hadn't intended to walk all the way from town and hadn't expected rain.

An editor might suggest to the author, "I'm not sure readers are going to be able to skim over that spelling for the heroine's name.  It's going to stop them, make them think too long about how to mentally pronounce it."  Maybe there are reasons for the odd spelling, or maybe not.  And that can be an easy thing to fix if the author decides to take the editor's advice, either by changing the spelling or by providing an explanation so the reader can recognize and "hear" the name.

But looking at that scene, the editor may also say, "Give me more description of the cabin.  How big is it?  What kind of furniture?  Is it warm or cold?  Why do you say it's empty when you've just said it has some furniture?  Do you mean no one was there, or is the 'empty' a kind of comparative term?  Why not have Jessikah/Jessica wonder about the roof in her own thoughts rather than narration?"

Now again, this is a tiny passage, and this hypothetical editor is focusing in on a very small section.  But assuming the author agrees with her editor, maybe the author rewrites the passage:

Jessica stood in the cabin's doorway and took in every detail of her surroundings.  The small space seemed larger than it really was because a crude table just large enough for one person to dine and a narrow bed in the corner comprised the only furnishings.  Ashes lay black and cold in the fireplace.  The very air smelled of damp and emptiness and abandonment.

She closed the door behind her, shutting out the storm.  With a nervous glance upward, she whispered, "Please don't leak, roof."  The last thing she needed after the long, unexpected walk from town was more water falling on her already soaked clothing. 

Editing, then, is something the editor does and then the author has to respond to and act.  The editor's job isn't the end of the process, the way the proofreader's is.

Here's another hypothetical example of how an editor works:

By the time they had loaded everything in the wagons, Melody ached everywhere.  She couldn't remember when she had felt so completely exhausted.  Back in Boston she had worked hard, scrubbing floors and toting water for the laundry and waiting on the various old ladies who had hired her.  Like old Mrs. Cleeford who added the task of caring for her miserable old cat to Melody's chores.  Melody hadn't liked cats since then.

And the editor adds a note regarding the highlighted section:  "Is this really necessary?  Nothing else in the book references Melody not liking cats. . . . or Mrs. Cleeford."

So sometimes an editor suggests that something be removed from the book.  This may be due to length restrictions -- which is more a concern for print publication than digital -- or because it just doesn't add anything to what may be an already rambling narrative.

The original version of one of my published books included a lengthy scene in which the heroine has a particularly vivid nightmare that seems to foretell events that unfold later on in the novel.  I felt it was a very well written scene and it depicted some of this character's fears at being in a situation over which she had virtually no control and which offered a lot of threats to her safety.  The book's editor, however, said the scene was too long and really didn't add anything to the story.  I was very reluctant to include that scene in the cuts that had to be made to reach a publishable word count.  As I realized later, however, I could convey the character's fears and even her apprehension that something terrible will happen in a few lines of dialogue with other characters, and thus leave the actual development of events for dramatic, on-stage action rather than duplicate what had already been portrayed in the dream or, far worse, relegate the on-stage action to a brief "everything happened exactly as she had dreamt in her nightmare." 

I was asked a few days ago why I spend time reading and evaluating other people's books.  My answer was, of course, that if I hope to sell my books in an increasingly crowded digital marketplace, I need to know what my competition is.  And then I have to figure out ways to give myself and my books a competitive edge.

Do I believe that good writing, solid story-telling, and clean formatting are enough of an edge in the digital marketplace?  The truth is, no, I don't.  It wasn't enough in the days of print-only, and it certainly isn't enough now.  Twenty years ago, no one was defending and/or dismissing "published" books that were so filled with grammatical errors that they were virtually unreadable, mainly because "published" books weren't filled with grammatical errors.  Now we have authors, their friends, their husbands, their mothers, posting glowing reviews of books that independent reviewers assess as so poorly written that the books are difficult to read.  How can any author who doesn't have a huge fan base or a publisher's promotional apparatus even hope to compete with that, short of doing the same?

I don't  know for sure.  Yet.