Why An Author’s Proof? Before Publishing, From The Printer

Why an Author’s Proof? Here is one, and you can see It’s clearly not meant for retail sale. But why get one?

Immediately after a book – not an eBook, but a print book – is approved for publication, an author’s proof is made available, and gets printed right away. In theory a writer will hold off publishing until after having a look at the proof.

But why get one at all? The answer is – because. Things go wrong. My books sell on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Goodreads, major wholesaler for libraries, schools, bookstores etc. And more. And, here is the horrible part, every one of them have different formatting requirements. Really very stringent formatting guidelines. It’s so difficult to do this that many writers hire offshore talent to do it for them. If I need to format for Ingram it is such a chore that it’s worth $15 to have someone in Pakistan do it for me.

But still, why the proof? Because what I see on the screen can be very different from what I see in print. Shouldn’t be that way, but blame the printers for their software. And particularly if the book has images, there are three bleed zones for an image and they have different formatting settings. It will look great on the screen, and then the book arrives – a real mess.

But then there are times when it is the writer’s fault. Like on this one. I hope you can spot what I did wrong, and it was certainly my fault. But double my fault because I had approved the book for print, and two copies were sold before I spotted this flaw. So, I had to resubmit the corrected version, causing print delays.

I just read a proof for my new book A Dark Day For Planet Earth. Found an error where spellcheck had changed my work ‘born’ to ‘borne’. It plays such a small part in the sentence I am not going to make the change, plus many copies have already been sold.

So, a proof is something that should not be skipped. I’m always very eager to get a new book released as fast as possible, but I have to be patient and wait until I can read the proof.

And by the way, all this formatting and such, is easily one-half the time and effort of writing a book. Not kidding, writing is the easy part.

And don’t get me going on book covers!!!