Proofing has to be the most difficult part of writing--I don't care what it is! I sent the proof book to Jim and we both re-read RIPTIDE from beginning to end. He made some suggestions and I did some rewrites which I emailed to him for editing and then I made whatever corrections he suggested. So the whole book was edited one last time, the changes were edited and then the corrections were edited. So you would think I could upload the book and it would be perfect, right? Well, not necessarily so.
When I uploaded TIDES, the formatting was exactly the same, page for page. For whatever reason, RIPTIDE shifted the text adding a line or two (or more) at the bottom of each page. This meant I had to go in and change the Table of Contents page numbers because the later chapters were off by as many as four pages! Well, I did that, uploaded again, and proofed through the virtual previewer. Everything looked fine. So, I approved it.
Well, I'm not too old to learn a lesson! I have since read the entire book again, found several examples of words that were hyphenated in the original text because they were at the end of a line and somehow ended up in the middle of a line. I found a few other things I decided to change while I was at it--nothing major. I've uploaded again. I feel badly about this because the people who have already purchased the book didn't get as good a version as this newer version. There's no major differences, but still...
When Jim and I finish editing TSUNAMI, we're both going to read the proof book, but then if there are any changes made, I'm going to order another proof book and reread the whole thing again before putting the book "out there." This is very time consuming and because I wrote the passages and have read these same passages several times, I still get caught up in the story, but I can't 'see' it as if it were the first time--which is the best way to proof anything. However, readers deserve for a book to be the best that it can possibly be, so I promise that next time, I'm not going to rush it and skip a vital step! All I can say now is that I'm sorry! I'll tell you one thing: I have more compassion for the books I read by other authors because I now realize how difficult it is to catch every single error!!!
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