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Pursuit of Perfection

I received the latest proof copy of Null_Pointer last night and let my wife read through it with her very excellent editor’s eye.  She immediately found things that needed to be fixed.  I had to make a decision about how many errors I should knowingly let in the final product.  How many errors are too many?  How many errors would cause the average reader to toss the book across the room?  How many errors would never get noticed by most readers?

Some of the things she found were formatting, some were sentence structure and a few were using the wrong word or a typo.  When her list got past 5, I made the decision to postpone the launch and do another proof.  So that’s what we will do this weekend and then upload and order again on Monday.

I may never be able to make the book perfect, but it has to be damn close.  The reason is that self-published books are for the most part, crap.  They are not professionally edited and suffer greatly for it.  The only way to rise to the top is to be as close to perfect as you can possibly be.  Not only in copy editing, but in story, writing, cover design and layout too.  There is no question that NP is a better book than my first one, in every respect.  But I believe that I can do better, both as a writer and as a publisher of paper back fiction.  So next year, when I’m down to the final, final proof of Tyrmia, expect that it will be worth the wait.  It has to be.

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