I awoke this morning, shuffled into the kitchen, turned on the laptop, and put a much needed pot of chocolate truffle coffee on, as is my daily habit. I'd been up until 2:30 in the morning working on this and that, so you can well imagine the fog hovering within my brain.
Coffee in hand, I fired up my AOL and checked my email. Nervous energy set my limbs tingling and a hord of butterflies loose in my belly. My 'cold read' review sat staring back at me from the mailbox. Uh, oh...
Non-the-less, I clicked the email open and put a tight reign on my expectations. No, that's not true, I expected the worse. In most things, I'm pretty optimistic but when it comes to my writing, I seem to lean the opposite direction. Go figure.
Perhaps, I should back up a moment and explain the 'Cold Read' concept. I decided I wanted to be absolutely certain there would be no embarrassing errors or issues post-publication of my book, so I chose to send the book out for two unbiased cold reads. One was a professional editor who knew absolutely nothing about me or my story, the other a family member who, basically, loves to read.
Results:
Family member read turned up two typos and positive feedback.
Professional editor came back with a four page review/report of the book including--yes! not horrendous, but a list of errors missed in an extremely grueling editing process.
Moral of this story:
No matter how we strive, and even the editors strive, to make our novels perfect, it seems it is impossible not to miss something. I strongly urge any author to consider this step in your galley process before sending that final proof to production. It certainly panned out for me, and you can rest assured that I will take this step with every project I send to production.
Now for the best part. The review!
"You have a winner here with 'Curse of the Marhime.' Great story idea, colorful and three-dimensional characters, tension, passion and sweetness all mixed up in sexy shape-shifters, magic and mayhem."
Cold read review done by Lill Farrell, Staff editor, The Wild Rose Press
Interesting thought, though I wonder about the implications of having another editor read your work after your own editor has been through it. What if the cold read editor had made major suggestions for content changes? I guess you could just decline, right?
ReplyDeleteGood question, Allie. But the purpose of the 'cold read' is a fresh pair of eyes to be sure everything is as it should be--somewhat like a copyedit. And yes, if it had backfired and major suggestions were made then yes, I would have the option of declining requested major changes, though, as I said this is a final run through for typos, grammatical errors, etc. that we may have missed.
ReplyDeleteHope this answers your question and again this is only my opinion as an author. I do speak from experience. I found 25 errors in my hard copy proof of my first published book and luckily the publishing house was gracious enough to redo it.
Thanks for you thoughts.
Dayana
Allie sent me. I wish you the best of luck with your book and site.
ReplyDeleteCindi
jchoppes[at]hotmail[dot]com
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