Have you ever read a published book, or an ebook, found a mistake and said to yourself: ‘Why didn’t anyone just read this through?’  Well they did.  Many times.  So many times.

I write a book.  I type out a hundred thousand words, read them through, retype many of them, and eventually write those two wonderful little words: ‘The End”. You don’t have to do that, but I like to.  The result of all this work is known as ‘The First Draft.’

It goes off to my editor.  A good editor identifies the weaknesses in the book: which characters don’t work, where the plot is too slow, where I am not achieving what I am trying to achieve.  She sends me an email several pages long, enumerating the problems I need to fix.  When I first read this email I am disappointed and defensive. Disappointed that the book isn’t perfect (although I always knew it wasn’t, I secretly hoped it was) and defensive because I have spent so long thinking about the story that I can’t conceive that it can be changed.  So I put the email to one side for a couple of days.  Then I come back to it and reread it; usually I see her point.  

I need to find solutions.  Sometimes this is easy - adding a couple of paragraphs to explain a character.  Sometimes it is really difficult, like moving a revelation that happened in the first chapter to the middle of the book. Always, the book is stronger. 

I think the most radical change occurred in my second novel, Trading Reality.  The chief tech guy at a virtual reality company was an amiable fat slob called Keith.  I liked him, but he was a bit of a stereotype.  So I changed his name to Rachel, gave him long curly hair, a smoking habit and a liking for mid-century American poets.  I really liked her, and fortunately so did my editor and my readers.  Changing all the ‘he saids’ to 'she saids' was a challenge, though.

Many authors are told to delete scenes or parts of scenes.  This doesn’t usually happen to me: I usually add texture, so the second draft is about 10,000 words longer.

After three, four or five drafts, the manuscript goes to the copy editor.  This is a skilled job.  He or she must read the manuscript through carefully a couple of times, point out grammatical mistakes and typos, and importantly highlight inconsistency.  This can be as straightforward as someone with blue eyes on page 56 having brown eyes on page 300.  Or it can be a lot more complicated.  They often check facts - sometimes they find mistakes.

In many of my novels, there are a number of American characters speaking.  For my novel Launch Code, set on an American nuclear submarine, I sent the manuscript to half a dozen volunteers, three of whom had served in the US Navy, who were very helpful.  'Ceiling' in the submarine became 'overhead' and 'wall' became 'bulkhead'. The two British/American mistakes I made most often were people 'taking' a decision - in the US you can only ‘make’ a decision, and the words ‘different to’.  In the US it must be ‘different than’.

This brings me to the one British/American misapprehension that really winds me up.  This is the myth that '-ize' (as in 'organize') is American and not British.  This is poppycock.  If you don’t believe me, just look up ‘organize’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, where 'organize' is preferred but ‘organise’ is allowed.  All of my publishers: Heinemann, Penguin, Atlantic Books and Head of Zeus have preferred ‘organize’.  Yet, my stupid spell check is right now changing ‘organize' to ‘organise' as I type the word.  Even worse, my daughters’ English teacher used to correct their spellings, changing '-ize' to 'ise', claiming it was an Americanism.

The difference between the two usages is that in Britain '-ize' or '-ise' is allowed, whereas in America, only '-ize' is permitted.  The reason is interesting.  British usage used to be only '-ize', until the nineteenth century when some sophisticates and poseurs decided to use the French spelling '-ise' (as in organiser).  American usage remained unsullied by these continental pretensions.  So the Americans use the authentic English spelling, and the British are permitted to choose between the original English '-ize' and the newer French '-ise'.

So pleased I got that out of my system!

The final stage in the process is the proofreading.  By now there should be very few mistakes.  Most will be formatting introduced by the typesetters.  A couple will be mistakes made while inserting changes at the last minute - always dangerous.  

Then the book comes out.  And despite all the work we have all done, despite rereading the damn thing 14 times, of the 100,000 words, one or two will be wrong.

All this editing, copy-editing and proofreading is expensive, but it does make the finished book much stronger and I am glad publishers are still willing to incur the costs.  Some self-published ebooks are riddled with errors, but most successful self-published or independent authors spend money on editors and copy editors themselves.  Readers appreciate it, and when you make that one mistake in a hundred thousand words, you soon hear about it from them!