Revisions in Self Publishing

All authors dream of big publishing deals for their novels, but it doesn't always happen. I'm happy enough with softly launching my writing career by self publishing a number of works I've completed and am happy with.

I've always been a reader and one of the things that drives me crazy is picking up a novel I've been anxiously awaiting written by a favorite author and finding errors throughout the book. I read with a pen in hand, making corrections. Maybe it's the perfectionist in me, but I get annoyed that these books are published by big name publishers who employ editors and proofreaders who let this stuff slip by them. It really ruins the books for me. Maybe I'm hypercritical, but when I spend between $20 and $30 for a hardcover edition of a favorite author's book for my personal library I expect a well-edited, proofread book with these glaring mistakes taken care of prior to publication.

I'm not a professional editor or proofreader but I am constantly rereading my own work and fixing issues I find. I've pulled some books two times to fix little things because they bother me. I know some publishers make Advance Readers Copies (ARCs) available. These books often have errors and issues in them...so I don't understand how final versions make it onto the shelves with so many mistakes in them.

Once a published novel is out there a big name publisher is not going to pull it off the shelf and fix it. Maybe if it goes into a second edition the mistakes will be corrected, but the majority of books are first edition only, here and gone. What I like about self publishing is that I can take my book out of the marketplace, fix the mistakes I find, and have it back out there usually within 36-48 hours. I want my readers to have the best experience possible with my books.

Black Knight, White Rook is being revised at the moment- some minor comma issues were discovered, and the name of Owen's parrot had changed from book one in t he series to this book, so I had to correct that, but otherwise there wasn't that much wrong with it. I'm working through the final copy, will pull the book, change it to the revised interior text with the fixes and put it back out there probably tis week.

I reread Black King Takes White Queen again over the weekend and have some comma issues and a couple of run-on sentences to fix, nothing major. I just want these two books to be the best that they can be.

Self publishing has allowed me to continue to tweak and revise my books as I find I need to because the platform I use allows me to pull my books from the marketplace, make my corrections, and then get them right back into the marketplace within a very brief window of time.

For now, that makes me happy, having that kind of control over my own work.