Robin Lyons

Behind-the-Scene: Independent Publishing

The dreaded typo. We all hate them and try to fix them before anyone sees the finished product—whether it’s a school paper, book report, news article, book review or a book.

Have you noticed we see what something SHOULD say, not always what it DOES say?

I remember being at a training workshop when the presenter projected a paragraph on the whiteboard for all to see. She said raise your hand when you see the typo. The woman I was with raised her hand. I read the paragraph, re-read it, I couldn’t see the typo, in the middle of a sentence was the word ‘the’ twice (the the). The sentence scrolled to the next line between the duplicate words. With one ‘the’ at the end of a line and the next at the beginning of a new line—I couldn’t see the error.

Thank goodness people have relaxed a bit with typos (autocorrect may be a contributing factor). ‘Typos happen’ seems to be the attitude nowadays. This relaxed mode doesn’t mean writers should lower their standard. A perfectly edited and proofread document should always be the goal.

You may have missed my post on social media where I shared that one reason I love being an #independentlypublished author is that I can fix a typo in five minutes and move on.

There are so many more reasons I love being Indie, I enjoy being the one to select the cover and determine the publication date. It would be nice to have someone else handle the marketing, but unless you’re a big name author, even traditionally published authors don’t have that luxury.

When I first started writing to publish, I researched traditional publishing and vanity publishing (which seems to have all but disappeared). It took me a few years to have a finished product and by then independent publishing was gaining momentum. E-Books would be different if we didn’t have independent publishing (Amazon continues to dominate in this area).

Here’s a brief explanation of the differences between traditional and independent publishing:

Create the story

INDEPENDENT (INDIE): Author

TRADITIONAL: Author

Edit the book (may require several edits)

INDEPENDENT (INDIE): Author pays editor