Sooooo, I am almost done reading through my stack of “no review” books and I am happy because this last one…. It’s only 270ish pages and not dense at all but it’s taken me more than a week to slog through. Why? Because there’s sooooo many errors it’s completely distracting me. I’m 40 pages from the finish line and it’s like pulling teeth. Probably will take me another two days to get through!
There’s a big wave of people within the independently published writing community who would see a book like this as the work of the devil. They like the perks of indie publishing but believe that in order to take advantage of it you should have your manuscript completely polished – otherwise, they claim, these poorly written or badly edited books just make us all look bad. I get it. As an independently published author I want to be taken seriously too because I did hire an editor and went through all the usual steps and I believe my book to be at least decent because of this. Can you find a typo somewhere? Probably. I tend to find two typos per book I read regardless of how it was published. But two typos is manageable – one to four typos for every three pages is not. This photo depicts me marking out every page with an error – with ripped up notebook paper because I did not intend to find this many!! If I did I probably would have bought some damn post-its. And yes, there are still 40 pages to go!
This book was given one negative review on Amazon which weirdly was not about the crazy amount of capitalization errors. It was however apparent this person did not read the book all the way through or come even close. They called it garbage.
Here’s the thing – the story in this book is not garbage. It’s coherent, it’s detailed, it’s complex. This author has done themselves a massive disservice in not editing because this is completely lost in the mess. So I am left in the awkward position of going back to this author, who I do not know, and sending him a Twitter message saying as politely as I can that I did not leave a review as promised because his book needs revisions. I’ll happily send a list of said corrections and I HOPE he takes it as the genuine concern it is and not as an excuse to fight because I am not a troll or a nitpicker. In fact I’m not even an editor (which I will highly suggest also go over this after my own corrections which are all super basic.) My reason for doing this is simple – if I can elevate another author to a higher tier of professionalism we all win. It’s a far better and kinder strategy than giving a bad review and bitching on Twitter. at least that’s what I chose to believe.
How this will pan out I don’t know but for now I will not be leaving a review of this book on my own site until I am reassured these problems will be fixed. Until then…. be kind and keep on writing! And reading!