Day: February 13, 2008

In the process of creating a book you read it about a million times. I am so familiar with the words and pictures of Hold on to Your Horses that I can practically recite it from memory. Only I’d probably get it wrong because I’ve been familiar with all the different versions of it as the words have evolved. Last week I finally reach the stage where the words had all been as tweaked as I could make them. All the pictures had been examined and placed. It seemed ready to go, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew that there were mistakes in the book, but I am so familiar with all the words and pictures that my brain was auto correcting errors without even registering them. I needed other people to look at the book and tell me where the mistakes were. This is called copy editing.

I had six different people take a look at the book. They all found glaring errors that I’d been missing. There were capitals in the middle of sentences. There were places where the words overlapped the pictures and were hard to read. There were words in the wrong tense. There were some misspellings. Each time copy edits came in I would look and wonder how on earth I had missed the mistake all those millions of readings before. But the really interesting thing is that each editor found different mistakes than the others. There were a few overlaps, but each editor found 2-3 things that no on else noticed. One editor was very visual and noticed spacing problems. A couple caught grammatical errors. Another focused on awkward wordings. Each editor brought something new and valuable. I am very grateful to them all.

I made all the changes. I burned the files to disk. Then I shipped them off to China. It is tempting to keep sending the book around to other people. Everyone found errors, there are surely some more lurking in there. But I know from experience that no matter how many people look over a book, some error will slip past us all. It happens every time with the Schlock books. I can only hope that the error is sufficiently minor that few people will notice it.