I consider myself a good typist and good proofreader. But, as the experts say, it’s difficult to proofread your own work. This has certainly come home to me lately.

First, in March I published the e-book version of Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. I did much proofreading of the text, especially in the two longest articles, which were from optical scans and had all the usually scanning errors in abundance.  In April I was putting the print book together, which included my first print cover creation using the graphic arts program G.I.M.P. I posted the cover to my self-publishing diary at the Absolute Write forums, and a person pointed out a typo: Enclyclopedia instead of Encyclopedia. It wasn’t published as a print book yet, which made it easy to change. I clicked the “publish” button in April.

After I did, I had an odd feeling that I didn’t remember the contents of one article. I was pretty sure I had proofread all the articles twice, and the two difficult ones three times. I pulled out the print book and read that article. Sure enough, somehow I had skipped that in the proofreading. I then went through it, and found one optical scanning error. Not awful, but something I shouldn’t have let slipped through. I haven’t yet corrected it and uploaded revised versions for print and e-book.

Then, earlier this month I published my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint“. Shortly after I did I posted about it on my Facebook personal page and author page. A FB friend pointed out to me a typo on the description. I think it’s a “the” that should be “they”. Since I was waiting on the Smashwords premium catalog approval, I decided to wait to fix the typo until I had that. That approval has come through, but busyness has prevented me from fixing the typo.

And last, in October 2012 I published the e-book version of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1. It’s a novella, not a full length novel. I’ve had only eight e-book sales of it. Finally last month and this I worked on completing the print version and getting it up for sale. I did that, ordered the proof copy, and did some spot reading. Found two typos, not awful ones. I decided to go ahead and publish it with the typos and fix them with a revised version ASAP. It went on sale around June 8.

My wife hasn’t read it, so last Saturday we read it aloud to each other, each taking a chapter or two and switching off. As we were reading, here and there we found a typo. At a few other places I noted where I could have worded something better. We marked those as I went along. Last Sunday I made the changes in the print book and uploaded the new version. It went live Monday (yesterday) evening. Error free? I hope so, but make no such claim. Since then I’ve typed the corrections in the Kindle version and uploaded them. The revised version went live sometime during the evening. Tonight I hope to make the corrections to the Smashwords edition.

These are way too many typos. I realize that even books by trade publishers have typos, that proofreaders are fallible people who don’t catch every error. But doggone it, I have to do a better job than that.