It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I last visited my first novel efforts. My last posting about taking my first draft novel off the publishing lists was about 5 years ago. A lot of things have been going on in my day job and personal life that have kept me distracted, including our firm being acquired, and more importantly, the loss of my dear mother. While the effects of both still linger, life goes on, and my dream of writing novels must as well.
I hope others will get enjoyment out of reading my novels, but there is joy in creating them for me as well. I’d pulled my first novel, “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” off the digital shelves when I realized it was riddled with unprofessional errors. Since then, I’d haphazardly tried doing some re-proofreading myself, but in my heart, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. I have this weird issue when proofreading my own work that causes my brain to read into sentences things that aren’t there, like missing words or missing ‘s’ or ‘ing’ parts of words. My odd mind just autocorrects what I’m reading and I breeze by things that need to be fixed. I can catch myself doing this at times, and made some proofreading progress, especially the parts where I used dictation software that created a lot of issues, but it wasn’t 100% accurate.
So after realizing I had my novel offline for such a long time, and after seeing much of what I thought could be in the world of Artificial Intelligence starting to come true in present day, I figured it was time to get this fixed. And to do this, I knew I needed some help, so help is what I sought after.
After searching for freelance proofreaders, I came upon an App called Fiverr that had all sorts of freelancers offering their services. Many more topics than just novel proofreading, but that was what I wanted, so after searching through the many fine proofreaders available, I settled on a gentleman named Victor Serrano, who specialized in Science Fiction and was a self-published author himself. While this was a bit of a cost for me, and I’m likely to have spent more on this than I may ever make on the book itself, it fulfilled a great need for me. This would allow me to get a novel I could be happy to present to the world without the distraction of so many errors.
Victor did a great job and in the end, I felt this was money well spent. He proofread my novel for typos and grammatical errors, and I also paid for the extra service of him pointing out issues with plot and consistency. The results were wonderful as he has a keen mind for proper formatting and reader experience. He pointed out a few glaring issues with the story that needed a little work to clarify and improve the reader experience, which were spot on, and I made changes to correct for. I have a bad habit of putting two spaces between sentences, which to me makes it more readable, but is not likely the standard, so I’ll still do that on this blog post, but I’ll have to watch out for that otherwise.
Other minor changes were for some word choices, some remaining typos and a few sentence structures, but the end result is a more professional manuscript. So given my name is on this, I’m very happy with the results now. I wasn’t warned, though, that Fiverr would hit me up for a “tip” payment after I approved his work, so my funds were already depleted for this project and I didn’t have any more to give. I’m not sure if it’s customary to tip for such services, or not, but Fiverr would surely have taken a piece of that, so likely they ask for that “customary” financial response on everything going through their platform. Had I known they’d ask for that, I may have chosen a less expensive route, so they should mention this up front.
All-in-all, I’m very happy with the process, and have cleaned up my first novel, “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” to the point that I’ve submitted this 2nd edition to Amazon.com for publishing. I’m just waiting for this to clear and then it will be available in ebook and paperback there once it’s gone through their checks. I’m very glad to be back on track as I’d held off on working on my second novel, “Burt’s Bots” for a long time now, as it didn’t make any sense while the first novel still had work needed to complete it. This has really sidetracked my writing efforts since proofreading wasn’t the part about writing a novel that I enjoyed, but a very necessary part of the overall effort. With the first novel now fixed and about to be re-published for this 2nd version, I’m now free to work on my next novel, which is a very liberating feeling.
Given this, I’m going to keep a little money to the side to avail myself of this service again as it’s very helpful to have a professional second set of eyes to go over my work and make sure it’s in as good a shape as it can be. I’ve learned from my previous experience that you don’t want to unleash your creation to the world until it’s a professional manuscript as that makes the reading experience much more enjoyable. And in the end, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it.
Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: 2nd Edition submitted for publication on Amazon.com (Pending clearance)
“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline: 1,777 words (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft: 19,463 (Went back to outlining 1st though, and will complete outlining before continuing.)