There are more ways to proofread a book than most of us can imagine. I want The Cabins of Wilsonia to be the most error free book around. I know it isn’t possible for it to be perfect, but I am giving it every possible check that I can think of.
Pencil drawing of outhouse on Cedar Lane without any retouching in Red/Green/Blue, AKA RGB
Two different friends read through the book for typographical errors. There were a few words that were omitted, a misplaced quotation mark or two, some comma problems, and a weird typeface problem.
This has no retouching but is converted to grayscale.
Good to go, yes?
No.
After the conversion problem, I decided to keep proofreading. Look at all the checks I thought of to do:
1. Quotation marks – all consistently with the period first and then the quotes? Nope, caught a few of those.
2. Peoples’ names – 3 different peoples’ names had a dash preceding the name. Why? Who knows? Now no name has a dash.
3. Has every single drawing been converted to Grayscale? Nope, one was still RGB, which stands for Red Green Blue.
4. Were the edges of every single drawing as clean as they could be? They were after I redid 12 of them!
5. Are all the files in the TIF format rather than JPEG? Of course! I’m not THAT careless!
Pencil drawing of outhouse, converted to grayscale, and all the imperfections have been removed.
Before I send the book to the printer, I will consider all the other ways to proofread. Who knew there are this many options?
Jana,
Hey, I can comment here! Yay. 🙂 I’ll use it for both sites. Proof-reading, yes it goes on and on, doesn’t it? Have you tried reading it aloud? That helps. Have you tried reading it word by word by word, slowly, meticulously, since we have a tendency to skip over words as we read silently?
Your friend’s commissioned piece turned out nice. The pink bushes on the sides were eye-catching with the other colors.
Have a great week, Jana.
Jennifer Dougan
http://www.jenniferdougan.com
Welcome, Jennifer! One day I hope to get the comments repaired on my other blog. This one is less active, now that the book is about ready to go to press. And thank you for the kind words about “Spring in Three Rivers” – Mignon and I love the redbud. It is native to our part of California and I believe it is native to many other parts of the USA.