Letters to Kel: GET YOURSELF SOME FRESH EYES

No, I'm not talking about investing in Visine or taking a nap before you proofread your story.

I'm talking about finding someone to help you with the final polish. Someone to read through it and find all those little glitches and stupid typos that you didn't catch.

Here's the thing: After you've gone through your story a half-dozen times, and maybe paid an editor to go over it with you two or three times, you and your editor get kind of familiar with what's on the page. You have an idea in your head of what you want on the page, how you want the book to feel, the level of clarity. And after you've been over your book again and again and again ... your mind plays tricks on you. You see the sentences and paragraphs as you WANT them to be ... not how they really are. Your brain inserts the right words in there, and you gloss over the mistakes.

Here's what you need to do:
1 -- Find someone who has not read your story yet. Preferably someone you haven't talked to about the story, either, so they don't have expectations.
2 -- Find someone with a good, solid grasp of the rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation -- and the English language!
You might think that's obvious, but it's not -- I've edited plenty of people who speak English as their second or third language, and instead of going to someone who is a native speaker and reader and writer of English, they go to one of their immigrant friends who they consider more skilled with English, and ask them to check the book. Well, chances are good this more skilled friend makes the same grammar, spelling, syntax and punctuation mistakes as the author.
3 -- DO NOT ASK FAMILY OR FRIENDS to read the manuscript. They'll tell you it's wonderful, don't change a thing. Or they'll focus on stupid little things that aren't wrong (for instance, I edited a book where the author's relatives insisted AFTER the book was published that "If you were a virgin, you were allowed to wear white" was wrong, and proper grammar was, "If you was a virgin, you was allowed to wear white." *sigh*) or they'll believe you're talking about them when you aren't, and their feelings will get hurt -- or worse, you ARE talking about them, and they'll want you to totally rewrite the book to suit them.
4 -- DO NOT WAIT until AFTER publication to ask for feedback from your smart, grammatically skilled friends. Do it beforehand, while you still have time to make corrections to the manuscript.
4a -- As a corollary, do not accept or ask for feedback after publication, if you did not ask someone (several someones, preferably) to look at it before publication. I had a client who kept friends and family completely out of the loop of her book. Then, they stood around her at the booksigning/release party for her book and pointed out all the mistakes they thought she made -- in public! To make matters worse, when she accused me of destroying her book, I asked her to tell me what the mistakes are ... and NONE of those mistakes were in the manuscript after I edited it -- she had sent the WRONG version of the book to the publisher, and never checked the galley proofs.
5 -- When the publisher sends you galley proofs of your book, this is the time to look for errors and correct them. This is NOT the time to look at the formatting, and decide if the font is "pretty" enough for you, and if the margins are wide enough, or you don't like the dingbats between sections or other graphics. This is the time to fix the TEXT.

The bottom line is: ASK FOR HELP, and ask those with skill and experience to give that help. Would you go to a stonemason for help with making lace? Would you ask someone from a tropical island to help you design clothes to stand up to an Arctic winter?