When I published Liberator’s Ruin last year, opting to go it alone after I realised that no self-respecting agent would take a chance on the book, owing to its lack of marketability (steampunk fantasy is a relatively small sub-genre, after all), I thought I’d caught every last problem. True, I thought there would be some that would slip through, but not a great deal.
And then the reviews started to come in. they praised the story and the characters, but criticised the editing, often finding missing punctuation, speech marks, sentences that didn’t end, or misspelled words. Going through myself, I think I found several hundred errors. Then, some very nice people I’d met on Goodreads offered to provide me with a list of problems they had found. Some were down to language differences, but in the end there were probably over a thousand errors.
For a published work, that’s cringe-worthy. And in a moment of chagrin, I realised that I was guilty of the same sin I criticised a lot of self-published work for doing: releasing what was in actuality, unfinished work.
I’ve tidied up the book since, and with luck, the number of errors left in Liberator’s Ruin are now just a tiny fraction. I’ve learnt a valuable lesson for my next book.
Never assume your work is perfect, and always get someone to proofread who doesn’t know the book.
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