from Amazon
Thursday, January 26, 2012
BP2012
The word of the day here is: options!
***
I know people are going to complain about the typos at some point. Seriously, try editing something. And then re-edit it. And then re-edit it again. Tell me how many typos you find on the third pass through per page. Multiply that by 300 or 600 text pages. It’s scary how much stuff can get through.
This is not a novel that takes a year from manuscript to finished product.
I said this before with regards to The Book, but I’ll say it again. The worst experience of the book process was the editing. The way we did it is that one guy wrote a chapter, and the other two edited it. It was perfect. We went chapter by chapter, fixing all the errors, and then bundled it into a book. And how many errors did we find the first pass-through of the bundle? Over a thousand. This was AFTER we did the chapter-by-chapter corrections! I was so deflated after that. Here I thought, we were almost ready for production, and boom, that happened.
Those were all corrected, and we had a second pass-through. We were in the hundreds of errors. And then a third pass-through. I can’t remember how many pass-throughs we had. At one point, we simply said: we’re going to stop now.
So, hats off to all the editors out there. It’s a thankless job, like being an umpire.
