I had a thought… Authors on this site quite proudly (and rightly) announce their latest releases, and remind us of their older works. Many of us delightedly hop right out and and pick up the latest publications, and buy or reread the older ones we may have lost sight of. It’s a lovely activity, and I very much enjoy it.
Just one thing… I can’t turn off my copyedit eye. I’m sure everyone has polished their works in many ways, just like I do, but — you know how it is — grammatical errors & typos will creep in for all of us.
No judgment on my part… but I sure do wish there were a way to let authors here know of copyedit issues, as a favor from another pair of eyes, just as I would appreciate hearing about oopsies in my own works, since I would welcome opportunities to fix & re-release my stuff.
But I hesitate to try and dig up email addresses when I find things, in the suspicion that it would not be welcome.
Rather than just shake my head and ignore this, I thought I might ask for opinions. Would you want people here to let you know, after publication, about any copyedit issues they encounter? (I would.) How could they do that, without exposing contact info?
(I’m singling out only indisputable copyedit “errors”, not anything else to do with plot/characters/story/language, although even copyedit doesn’t restrict itself necessarily to a single indisputable choice. Everything is potentially debatable, and that’s not going to be welcome.)
I do assume that the balance of opinion here will be negative, but I just want to help when I see an opportunity, so don’t hold it against me.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Copyedit alerts”
I’d rather have a trusted friend peruse my work, with the objective of improving it.
Of course. I’m not suggesting replacing anyone’s process, just letting them know about typos etc. after publication, when I notice them as I go by, as candidates for post-publication fixes.
I don’t have a problem with people e-mailing me with catches. I have a list, and I really do need to go back through and fix some things, then re-upload the books (which means changing some out of Mobi. Sigh.)
I don’t like the Amazon (TM) quality dashboard, because for a while if you got a certain number of catches, the ‘Zon threatened to pull your book. I don’t know if that policy is still in place or not.
I hear you on the process issues. I also make a practice of publishing digital bundles for my series (2-book chunks, whole series, etc.) so any fixes have to be done in multiple products. That turns into an all-too-easily-postponed batch process (sigh).
I’d appreciate getting polite emails alerting me to errors. I’ve read back through books years later and been horrified at what wasn’t caught and corrected.
I’d want to know if I’m embarrassing myself in public. 😛
I’m going to buck the trend and say honestly, no, I really don’t.
I know they mean well, but after pulling a 12 hour shift and dragging in the door, the last thing I want is to open my email and find someone cheerfully telling me all the ways I suck, and expecting I should be grateful to be told, or that I’ll now somehow carve the 15-30 hours out of my and my husband’s schedules to do another edit pass and release.
If someone who knows me well enough to have my email wants to privately tell me typos or plotholes, fine. If someone whom I trust enough to have in my personal space wants to privately warn me of a wardrobe malfunction or fix the tag on my shirt, fine.
But I neither want a stranger on the street to stop me with well-meaning intention and tell me that my gait isn’t symmetrical, the holes piercing my ears are 1.5mm off, I’m carrying 70 pounds more than ideal, that colour doesn’t flatter in this light and those shoes are two seasons behind fashion… nor do I particularly want a stranger to publicly tell me that I had a typos on chapters 13, 22, 35, and 60, and don’t I know it’s gas not petrol, curb not kerb, truck not lorry, and flashlight not torch?
I kicked it out the door. It’s done. It’s meant to entertain, not to be a perfect shining example of the English language. (Which is anything but a perfect language in the first place.) If it entertained, it did its job, but I don’t want to look at it again.
I’m very serious about the I Don’t Want To Ever See It Again.
I’m dyslexic. Which means by the time a reader sees a story, I’ve already done up to 14 edit passes, including alpha readers and beta readers and at least one copyeditor. It may have been fun to write, but each one of those is 60-grit sandpaper on my skin, until I will break down crying at having my nose rubbed in my inability to see what normal people do.
When it goes out the door, I’m so bloody sick of it that I’d rather eat my own vomit than re-read it One. More. Time.
So nope, don’t care. Amazon can rack and stack those errors into a neat report, (and when threatened, I’ll have a thoroughly miserable few weeks fixing it), and in the meantime, I’m off ot the next story.
^what she said. People who know how to find me on Discord are welcome to PM me about typos if they can provide enough context to be helpful, but I make no promises about fixing stuff promptly. I might wrestling with a different writing project or ground down by RL stuff, or just plain too sick to type coherently.