In reply to Stephen del Mar.

Thanks! I’m glad you’ve had a better experience. Though I think I’m also glad to have been so consistently pushed to learn how to do it all myself. A work in progress, always, and I love that! {8’>

Wow. I needed to send my editor a box of candy right away. I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Great post and I’m glad I found your site.

This site has pdf downloads on formatting POD books. If you’re unable to grab a pdf there, let me know and I’ll send you one.

http://www.bookdesigntemplates.com/

In reply to Becki.

Yeah, the trick is that I’m not reading when I do that, because I can’t. I’m just looking at words & punctuation, then sentences. If I try to go front-to-back I end up reading the story, which is a different sort of job. {8’>

In reply to David.

Reading backwards?? Wow, not sure I could do that one. 🙂 I normally use a ruler as I go through the page, making a point to read each word (sometimes “out loud” in my brain, if that makes sense). I often ask my husband before I start an edit, “do you want me to look for mistakes or focus on story?” because I can’t do both at the same time.

In reply to Becki.

I’ll go look. Looking forward to it!

In reply to Shantnu Tiwari.

Ha! Reminds me…I had an editor tell me a murderer wasn’t believable because he was a college professor. Also, a clean-cut kid around college age couldn’t make his living playing poker unless I showed him committing a crime early on. Or something like that.

I’ve said this before somewhere or other, but I don’t find typos to be much of a challenge. I start at the end of the book/story and go backwards one word at a time, then look at each sentence when I reach its initial word. I make a little mark for each sentence just to slow myself down. I also read the whole thing aloud & record it, then sit with the manuscript in front of me and listen. Plus, there’s this stage where I shuffle all the pages (fun!) and look for a way to increase tension or improve something else on every page. I find stuff.

It’s a bit time-consuming but works well enough that a couple of reviewers have praised the editing and nobody’s complained about a typo yet.

Hi David,

Came over from the Passive voice.

My 1st few experience with indie editors were the same (I never submitted to legacy pub).

My 1st book was a campy satire. One scene had the hero, a Phd, say funny things. To which the editor wrote, “No Phd will speak like that.” And then she wanted to turn the guy into a nerd.

This pissed me off. One, it was my character, and he’d speak as I damn well wanted him to. 2nd, the idea that all Phds are nerdy geeks is so insulting. And 3rd, I’d hired her as a copyeditor, not a content editor. When the book came back from her, it had 72 typos for a 65000 word book. My readers on Amazon found them.

Can you guess how humiliating that was? I got comments like “you should have hired an editor,” to which I thought, yeah man, I did. And she wasn’t particularity cheap either. Her CV said she had worked for many years for the big 6, but she didn’t know the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there’, ‘quiet’ and ‘quite’.

That said, I find I always find typos no matter how many times I self edit, so I do hire a copy editor. I design my own covers, though. Most artists use the same stock photos I can buy for 10$

In reply to Becki.

Duh. Forgot to add his name, or you probably won’t find his books on the ebook sites. His name is Stephen Pytak, and his books are “The .40 Caliber Mouse”, “The .40 Caliber Mousehunt”, “The Wild Damned”, and the newest “Katerina Blues” which just came out in May.

In reply to David.

I don’t usually post links unless asked; never want to be a troll. 🙂

We have a website at http://www.mazzpress.com, which gives you some idea about the series, which is called “The .40 Caliber Mouse” (also the title of the first book). There’s also a fan page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/73569003271/ called “.40 Caliber Mouse: Fans with a Vengeance”.

The ebooks are available at amazon, smashwords, and the usual other major retailers. Samples are made available for those who want to just try a little.

He’s also written songs connected with his books and hired musicians to record them, made short films about the characters, made t-shirts from the books, commissioned a mask from his third book… in short, just about everything but make a feature/blockbuster movie. I’m pretty proud of what he’s managed to do (some with my help, some with his own skills).

Your thoughts on what we’ve done are welcome! 🙂