Feedback from the most unlikely sources

 

As an author, we often rely on Amazon and Goodreads reviews to gauge the popularity of our books. To that, I'd add text messages and emails from friends and readers. After each book is published, I receive an email from a reader in a nearby tiny town. She tells me how she felt about the book (usually positive) then identifies the typo(s) she found. That's right. There are typos. Despite beta readers, editing, proofreaders, and my rereading the book a dozen or more times, there is a typo somewhere. In "Conflict of Interest", I missed typing an "N" on the end of Karyn. Go ahead. Search for it. Without her specific direction to the page, paragraph, and sentence, I couldn't find it. Sigh.

Numerous readers have commented that they find typos in EVERY book. I recently read a book by a very famous mystery author. He used a different last name for one of the protagonists on one page, then changed it back for the remainder of the book. In one of his previous books, at the last second, he switched the caliber of the protagonist's pistol from 10 mm to 40 caliber. He did a global "find and replace" for the 10 and 40 without changing the mm to caliber. Yes, that left his protagonist shooting a pistol with a 40mm projectile nearly 1.5 inches in diameter. That error was corrected in later printings, but there were a hundred thousand hardback books out there with the error.

Another famous author sent his protagonist on a canoe trip down a Minnesota river. At one point, the characters caught and scaled a catfish that they cooked under a sycamore tree. I cringe to point out that catfish don't have scales, and sycamore trees don't exist in Minnesota. Oops. I know that author, and I would gently mention it to him the next time I saw him if I didn't think he'd already been notified by at least one hundred people.

In my case, I blame typos and mistakes on my mind going faster than my fingers. Yes, I'm literally thinking a few words ahead of what I'm typing into the computer. That leads to myriad typos, errors, run-on sentences, dangling participles and more. One of my proofreaders, who I call the sentence structure and preposition policewoman, pointed out that I had SIX prepositions in one run-on sentence. "That's a punishable crime in some states".

My typing gets worse as I approach the end of a book. Dennis Lehane told me he was like a train going downhill on greased tracks as he approached the book's ending. It's true. I can't make the words come off my fingers fast enough. That creates a "target rich" environment of typos, punctuation, and grammatical errors for my proofreaders. It seems to overwhelm them. One found so many corrections I had to resupply her with a dozen red pens every few books. (She admitted uses beyond marking up my manuscripts.)

I go back and catch many of them on the rewrite, but not until my unnamed cop/horse/legal consultant and proofreader has waded through them. I know (most of) the rules. Microsoft catches a lot of mistakes. But they still squeak through for Deanna to catch. (Oops! Did I just identify the unnamed consultant? Darn. She'll berate me over that slip.)

Hopefully, my team and I have minimized the typos, and the excessive prepositions and occasional dangling participle won't detract from the "twisted plot and engaging characters" (that's a quote from an Amazon review).

Check out "Conflict of Interest" on Amazon, BN.com, or your local bookstore. 

Amazon.com: Conflict of Interest (Pine County Book 11) eBook : Hovey, Dean : Books

Hovey, Dean Pine County series - BWL Publishing Inc. (bookswelove.net)

Dean Hovey (BWL Publishing)