As an Independent Published Writer everything is on my table. Writing, rewriting, proofing, cover design, formatting, and of course upload. Sometimes it seems like too much. I still try my hardest to put out a good quality product. Now I know that many people suggest getting every book professionally edited, which is probably good advice. But at $500 to $1,000 a novel, it is just not something within my reach at this time, especially since I have ten books out and more coming, the culmination of fifteen years of writing. And so far it is costing me more than I am making, though that looks to be changing in the near future. I always thought I could do as go a job of it as any professional editor. In fact, in my younger days I was quite skilled at pattern recognition, and was able to go over page after page of numbers in a data set and immediately pick out the anomaly. I still think I do a pretty good job of it, but it seems that with words on a page there is something different. Maybe it’s because our minds fill in what we expect to see when we are reading. Maybe it’s fatigue at reading the same things over and over, trying to find every error. Whatever it is, it seems to be very easy to miss little things that some random reader will pick up. I recently received a review of The Deep Dark Well, which has received seven five star and two four star reviews. This reviewer liked the book as well, and gave it five stars, but commented on misspelled words and typos. I have read this book fifteen times, more than twice as many times as any of my other works, and have also had a beta reader look at it. It has been spellchecked, grammar checked (though I don’t always accept those suggestions) and format checked many times (and I think I can now say that the formatting is as good as it gets). Still, that was the second reviewer who mentioned misspellings (which could be because a word that is actually spelled right is not the right word, or the word they think should go there), so I thought I better do something about it. On a side note, I recently read a short story by the great Robert E Howard and found three typos on one page. And this work has probably been read by millions of people, and maybe scores of editors through the years.
I looked on the internet for a proofing program and found Ginger, which had the added benefit of being free. I downloaded it, installed it, and went to work, starting with a book I was not as sure of as The Deep Dark Well. I was amazed. It showed me each line in fast sequence, stopping whenever there was a proposed error. Not all were errors, and I was able to skip over them quickly with a click of the mouse. Some were glaring errors I must have passed over a half dozen times, and I could either accept Ginger’s suggestion or go to the document and type in my own. I found over sixty typos or misspellings in a 94,000 word novel, way more than I would want in something I put out on the net. Now is it perfect? Probably not, any more than the Howard story was perfect. But at least I’m confident that it is relatively mistake free. And what about The Deep Dark Well. I found seventeen errors with Ginger that I made changes to, and maybe fifteen more that weren’t really errors but were just my style. So now I can put it up as being as error free as I could make it. Ginger was amazing. It took four hours to do the first book (with more errors) and about six to do TDDW. Time that will be well spent on new works before I get into multiple formats, unlike now when I will have to copy and format my already published books to Kindle and Createspace. Ginger is free for now. If they start charging for it I will pay. It is that good. Remember that name, Ginger.