To err is human, to proofread is expensive and time consuming

I had a fairly interesting thing happened to me yesterday as a self publisher, and I thought I would indulge myself (and ask you to indulge me) as I tell you what happened.

First of all, a few comments about dealing with Amazon.com.  I am very fond of Amazon as they provide an excellent platform for me, a self publisher, to sell books.  For example, I always ask my customers how they found my book on Amazon, and a significant number of them found it because they were looking for another book and my book was suggested in their search.  I think that’s fabulous.  That aspect of Amazon is far more advantageous to me, a non-blockbuster author, than the somewhat passive approach to “any title other than the current blockbuster” of your average bricks and mortar bookstore.

One of the problems I have with Amazon though, is there is a bit of confusion in terms of garnering customer feedback.  Within a week or so of buying a book on Amazon, Amazon sends customers an e-mail asking them to comment on their purchase experience.  While I suppose this is helpful, I find an awful lot of people think they are reviewing the book when in fact they are merely reviewing the sales process.  This is too bad, because a lot of praise for the books gets buried, and the number of actual reviews has a huge impact on sales, far more, I think than a rating of the buying process and whether or not someone shipped on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Anyway, I am fond of saying to people, when I sell them a copy of my book, this somewhat snarky phrase: “this isn’t one of those store-bought books.  I wrote it myself.”  (This of course is a play on the concept of a store-bought cake as opposed to homemade.)  While store-bought desserts certainly look better, few people will argue that the homemade cake usually tastes better. 

So after five years of selling on Amazon, while I will not say I have ever become complacent, I have become a little bit spoiled.  I have a total of 24 reviews of my two books, and every single one of them is five-star.  I also have something like a hundred or more of those “rate the sales experience” comments, and I’m proud to say that I have not gotten anything less than 100% satisfaction.  Not that surprising given that I inspect each book before I ship and I ship same day via first class, not next week via media mail as amazon requires.  

So I was a little bit saddened yesterday, when a recent buyer of my book posted the first ever negative comment.  It was a complaint referring to some misspelled words in “Principles of Applied Stupidity.”  This was a little confusing, since I of course ran the book through a spellchecker… so I assume he was referring to various grammatical errors.

Well, I will say, guilty as charged.  I often make jokes about the grammatical errors in “Principles of Applied Stupidity,” saying, “well, are they accidental, or did I put them in there on purpose in order to make you the reader feel superior?”  The answer is mostly the former.  While I have become less concerned in my life and books about delivering perfection, and more concerned about overall quality and value of content, I am still as embarrassed as anyone to have a gravy stain on my tie pointed out to me. 

For what it is worth, while writing that book was tremendously rewarding, publishing a book like that is just a massive amount of work.  The "principles" are numbered and cross referenced throughout the book, so whenever I make a change or improvement in the book, this cascades into a whole series of updates and fixes.  Then of course there’s just making the table of contents refer to the correct pages– addition of one sentence on page 18 can change everything after.  And in the process of constantly adding info and improving the flow of the text, verbs that were singular or in second person might need to become plural in third person, and sometimes those changes don’t get put in.  Every time you see a grammatical error in one of my books, it’s an artifact from an earlier version and an attempt to improve the text.  Errors like that are hard to see when you have read the book 217 times.  

I am told that the time that elapses between a major publisher accepting a manuscript and it appears on bookshelves is 18 months.  If I had a year and a half, I’m sure I could get rid of all the typos in my book.  I would also go insane, and my customers and people I am trying to serve with this information would have to wait more than a year to get it.  I just can’t accept that kind of time frame.  Information becomes obsolete very quickly in the Internet age.

So again, my apologies to anyone who is offended or bothered by the grammatical typos in my books.  It is very very difficult to remove all possible grammatical errors from a 40,000 word text that is being constantly fiddled with and improved and rushed to the printer because we just sold out the last edition.  My goal is to provide useful information in an entertaining fashion, not to pretend that I am perfect.  As one of my Amazon reviewers said, “this book walks its own walk.”  Hopefully, by seeing me have the courage to stand up and say what i believe even though it means my perfections will be seen in public, you the reader will takes inspiration from that examples.

© Justin Locke