I Threw a Book in the Trash!

I threw one of my books in the trash last week. Yep, you read that correctly. I put it in the trash can with the used coffee grounds and dirty paper plates and old receipts and anything else that we had discarded last week. Anyone who knows me well knows that my books are among my most treasured possessions. Usually, if I buy a book, I will keep it forever.

So, what caused me to do something so out of character?

Before I left Texas a year ago, I bought several books by local authors. I’ve had a dwindling stack of unread books on my nightstand for a while. Recently, I began reading a book from the stack and it seemed to have a pretty good storyline. It was about 300 pages so obviously the author put some time into the project.

Several pages into the book, I noticed a few typos where words were either misspelled or were missing altogether from sentences. After about 50 pages, I was surprised to find more and more typos. When sentences have misspellings or are missing words, I usually must read them a couple of times to try and make sense of them. Finally, after 70 pages, I had had enough. I was so distracted by all the mistakes in the book that I was no longer enjoying the story.

So, into the kitchen trash it went.

This book was by a local author and had been self-published by her publishing company. Obviously, no one proofread it for her or if they did, they did a poor job. I was really disappointed by the book and sorry I wasted my time reading 70 pages of it.

If a person is going to write a book, they owe it to themselves and to their readers to have their book professionally proofread and/or edited. They should have enough respect for their readers to put out a product that is worthy of people’s time and money.

An author can ask an eagled-eyed friend or a retired teacher to look at their manuscript. There are retired teachers who do professional proofreading for a little extra cash. Every community has people who provide writing and editing and proofreading services. You can search for them on Nextdoor. If that isn’t an option, there’s always Fiverr or one of the other inexpensive service websites to go to for help.

This is one of the reasons that self-published books get a bad rap. It’s easier than ever for anyone who thinks they are a writer to publish a book. But there is more to writing a book than publishing a sloppy product. All authors have an obligation to keep the standards high for the work they publish so they can make money from their hard work and so their books don’t get thrown in the trash!