Well, book 2 in The Grigori Legacy, Sins of the Son, is off to the production department for typesetting and proofreading. Soon (I hope) it will be returned to me one last time at the galley stage for my own final proofread (at which point it is all marked up for printing and I do a little happy dance!). Now, considering that it will also be proofread at my publisher’s end (by someone who is almost certainly more skilled at that aspect of editing than I am), some of you might wonder how important it is for me to even be involved at that stage.
I’m glad you asked. 🙂
It turns out that it’s very important. Critical, in fact. Why? Because even after multiple reads by multiple sets of eyes, mistakes can still be missed. And I’m not talking the nitpicky typographical kind of mistake; I’m talking the glaring, how-in-the-heck-did-we-all-miss-this kind of mistake. Such as the one that very nearly happened in Sins of the Angels.
Please understand that by the proofreading stage, Angels had been critiqued by a half-dozen people, polished by me, seen three times by my agent and three more times by my editor (and once more by me between each of those readings), once by the copyeditor, again by me, and then by a proofreader. That’s a total of at least 22 readings before it came before me for the final time.
I have to admit that I really wasn’t expecting to find so much as a misplaced comma at that point, let alone a detail as obvious as the one that practically leaped off the page at me. Somehow, within the space of three pages, Alex’s badge had moved from her waist to the inside pocket of her blazer…without her aid. Twenty-two readings, not including the multiple revisions I made before I even submitted, and we’d all missed it. Frankly, I’m still mystified as to how that is even possible.
While I’m glad I caught the error, the perfectionist in me is downright paranoid about what else I might have missed. Which is why you can bet that, when Sins of the Son returns to my desk, I will be taking that final proofread very, very seriously! And, honestly, probably not sleeping all that well until the book leaves my hands and I can no longer do anything about it. 😉
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