Job #483: Proofreader

I got quite a few complaints about errors in some of the digital versions of my earlier books, as mentioned previously.  This was something we tried to put in the hands of professional proofreaders.  That didn't work.  It seems you really need to be the author (and in possession of a good memory as well as a clean hard copy* of the original manuscript) to catch all the errors and not fix things that weren't wrong.

So I'm doing it myself.  And this takes forever.  And because it takes forever I can't do it all at once, or the new book I'm supposed to be writing will never get finished.  I proofread the eBooks in the evenings, after my writing hours.

Not long ago, I did complete the review of Knaves’ Wager.  Eagle-eyed readers will notice that spelling has been Americanized (the attempt at British spelling was a policy of my first, hardcover, publisher), some less-than-felicitous word choices have been corrected, and the scene breaks have been returned.  The OCR errors have all, I trust, been fixed.  Since nobody's perfect, readers may still find an error here and there, but only the normal amount.

What they will not find is a new version of the book.  Even if I had the inclination to go back and rewrite a book I wrote several hundred years ago, I don't have time.  I was proud of what I wrote then; it's impossible to write the same kind of book now that I wrote at a different stage of my life; and I think most readers would rather have the original story.



*Had it been possible to transfer the originals to my hard drive, we wouldn't have had this problem in the first place.