A Lulu of An Update

One day after completing the third draft a couple of weeks ago, I received a copy of an earlier draft that I had made into a soft-bound book using the Blurb publish-on-demand service. You'd think I'd be excited to see my story in book form at last.

Well, I wasn't.

Oh, the print quality and the binding were fine. Excellent, in fact. The typography, on the other hand, was laughable, and the "Booksmart" program provided by Blurb is depressingly bad at handling large black and white text documents.

I can overlook the formatting issues. It was the content that bothered me. I found mistake after mistake, and by the time I finished reading the first chapter I was thoroughly depressed about my editing ability. Granted, it was just a test to see what it looked like, and I knew there were still errors in the version of the manuscript I had sent in to be printed, but man. It was depressing to see just how many problems remained.

And even though I read every single damned page of my book aloud, even going so far as to act out the voices of the characters to see if the copy flowed properly, when I re-read chapter one, I found eight more mistakes! Typos, duplicated words, overuse of the same adjective in adjacent sentences (God, how I hate that!)—you name it.

So I am now laboriously going through the manuscript with red pen one page a time, in hard copy. I'm about halfway done. The error count is definitely going down, but I still find sentence-order problems that need to be fixed, and certain passages that are awkward or go on too long about minutiae that only I care about.

In any case, I am going to try to complete the edits this weekend.

The other news is that when I complained of the print quality from Blurb, the POD service called Lulu.com was recommended to me. And it is far superior to Blurb in every way. Although I am irritated that Mac PDF files seem to give their prepress system fits, I can upload my book as a Microsoft Word document easily enough. I just went through the process of piecing together a publishable book on Lulu, and it's dead easy. And a lot cheaper than Blurb, to boot. I can get a 6" x 9" trade paperback copy for about $12, even with perfect binding and a full color cover.

So I guess I'd better get cracking on those edits. I'm a perfectionist, and I hate the idea of getting back a copy with three hundred egregious typos circled in red pen, but at some point, I've got to light this candle. And my prospective beta readers are getting anxious.