AN INDIE AUTHOR'S LAMENT

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 When I started my Aledan Series long before there was an Amazon, I went the traditional route. I sent out four-hundred-page manuscripts typed and double-spaced with what I hoped were brilliant cover letters. I hit slush piles with my book in most any traditional publisher that would look at science fiction.

The Aledan Psion wasn’t right, didn’t fit their criteria, wasn’t commercially marketable, blah blah blah to the tune of some twenty-nine rejections. That was before postage went up. Finally, one small press publisher offered to publish my book at his startup company. But that never happened. What I had written was science fiction romance with heavy emphasis on the relationship between the hero and heroine. 

I wrote several more novels both romance and science fiction romance then finally put them on the shelf after so many rejections. Then I discovered Kindle Direct Publishing. I could publish the books myself.

I took The Aledan Psion off the shelf and remastered it, updating the premise and characters for the twenty-first century. There was no funds for editors and proofreaders. Like most, I am a better editor and proofreader of other people’s work than my own.

Being an Indie author with finite resources, I must do my best to edit my own work. I found even line by line editing I still missed the kind of errors that annoy readers. So, I added a subscription to the Grammarly add-in for MS-Word which catches grammar errors, awkward sentences, and many typos. 

I generally edit everything I publish three times, reading it for content, running it through Grammarly, and proofing it one last time. But I was still not getting everything.

A writer friend told me to read it out loud. That didn’t work so well for me. I needed someone to read it to me. They have a speech to text program built into Windows now, and it’s decent. I already knew about another writer who had a text to speech program to read books. I just needed to find one I could afford.

I found Word Talk via google. The best part is it’s free. It’s never a good sign when a reader mentions your need for an editor in a review. When it happened before, I went back to the word version and scoured the text for typos, missed words, wrong words, and awkward sentences. Then I uploaded a corrected version.

It seems that there are some readers out there that jump at the chance to leave a bad review. I publish my author email address in all of my books now so readers can contact me directly with editing issues. I will recheck it and send a corrected copy to the reader.

Vyken's story was not changed with the re-edit, but I believe I have produced a much cleaner and more enjoyable read. The revised Vyken Dark is now live.

All except my free books can be found on Amazon and are available in Kindle Unlimited. Anyone kind enough to email me with the location of errors will get a FREE ebook from my list.

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Copyright © 2018
by Christine A. Myers