Inside the Asteroid belt seen against the sun in deep space
Sometimes life just slaps you in the face and you have to step back and think. That happened to me this weekend.
So as you probably know, my book launched on Friday, June 8th. And really if you don’t know that, why are you here? I mean you’re welcome – go buy my book. ~grins~
Now it is my first book under this pen name, and I try hard to write good books. I have plots, characters, twists, and I care about pulling you along for the ride. I am well aware my voice isn’t for everyone, and that is okay.
But the first review I got, the VERY first review was a one star. It said and I quote “The idea of the plot isn’t bad; the heroine isn’t too absurd. However, the author does not have control over apostrophes (they are missing in possessives and present in plurals) and frequently writes sentences that do not stand up to a grammar survey. The book would be much improved by a complete, competent proof-reading by an experienced editor.”
Hmm… so, my book didn’t totally suck but my control of the English language did. Okay, I will admit I HATE apostrophes. Commas too while we are at it. I don’t want anyone to change my story, but I’ll own up to not being able to see those errors. There are two reasons.
One – I paragraph read. Last reading test I took put me at over 900 words a minute. Which means I grab the meaning in one glance and move on. So I KNOW that is a possessive because plural wouldn’t make any sense.
Two – It is MY story. I know what it is supposed to say. Even reading it out loud I’ll correct it because most of the time EMT’s and EMTs is pronounced the same.
Which leads to my dilemma. I want people to love my stories, and obviously, as I proved, my errors are preventing that love. Now I’ll admit a proof reader would not be a bad idea. But, there is a slight catch. Proof readers charge by the word. No Choice is about 103k words. So at .015 (average) a word that means it will cost me $1,545.00 to have it proofed.
Hmmmm…. I promise if I was making that amount of money I would spend it. But after 3 days I’m still in the low three figures, so – no.
What does this mean? Well for now it means I am going to be REALLY paranoid about ‘s in my writing. And I’ll check one more time for typos. But after that – I’m going to hope my story is good enough for readers to over look the errors until I make enough money I can afford to do this, knowing the money will be made up.
Shrugs – sometimes our choices suck. This was one of them.