Book Editing
My day began with this:
Each of those little paper flags sticking out of the pages is an error that needed fixed before Body Politic could go to print. I went through flag by flag and fixed all the errors. There were at least 80 of them. It always amazes me how many dumb mistakes I make when putting a book together. Then I print it out on paper and suddenly they are glaringly, embarrassingly obvious. When all the things were fixed, I exported the book to a PDF and paged through it again. I found 30 more errors. I fixed those and exported again to PDF and handed the file to Howard. He found 14 errors. This is always the process. We go through iterations of book creation, each time focusing our attention on a different way of reading. Sometimes I read every word. Other times I just flip pages and look at image spacing. Eventually my eyes glaze over and it all looks like a blur and possibly even a bad idea. At some point we declare it done and I send it off to print. It is out of my hair for a couple of months until it comes back home bound in paper. By then I’m not tired of the book anymore. We’re excited as we open the boxes and see the book made real. But I guarantee that on that first flip through we’ll find a mistake we missed. It happens every time.