Hi all,
As some of you might know, our novel A Demon named Mike has been printed. And it did not go as planned. Meaning, it was indeed printed, 200 copies, the shipping was fine, the books were shiny and smelled new and... they were full of mistakes. We can't sell them, at all. We have to re-print them, and that's a lot of money wasted.
So in order to avoid you doing the same mistakes, let us tell you what went wrong, and how to prevent it.
Our first mistake was to set the size of the book before knowing exactly how many pages we needed. We went for a 40 pages, A5 print and forgot that 2 of these were the cover, and 2 were the inside of the cover. So we actually had 36 pages, but we needed 38.
How to avoid that? Simple. First count the number of pages you actually need, and find the fitting format. We did the reverse, and screwed up.
Our second mistake was to not use our own printer to get a "proof" out first. It's much easier and intuitive to find grammar or punctuation, or even spacing mistakes on paper than it is on a screen.
Result, we have to do it all over again because every single page has errors that could've easily been spotted if we had only thought of printing it ourselves first.
Our third and biggest mistake was rushing it. We were excited, the story had been beta read and edited, it was awesome, adrenaline rush and all, we had a pretty cover... So we just put our text in A5 format, made sure it all fit within the 36 pages (mistake) and... sent it. Without a thourough re-read. Sure, we went over it and fixed a couple of things, but that wasn't enough.
We should have let it rest a couple of days and gone over it once more with fresh eyes. Rushing is the best way to oversee missing punctuation or mixed up tenses.
That's it for now!
Tell us if that's useful to you, or you've had the same kinds of issues yourselves!