DIY Proofreading Is a Bad Idea
A book’s author shouldn’t be its (only) proofreader
I enjoy the meaty, collaborative nature of copyediting—the process of close inspection and tidying that a book manuscript undergoes after it has been acquired for publication but before the text is considered final. But proofreading (one of the last steps before the printing of the actual book) also has its peculiar satisfactions.
I get a little jolt of triumph from spotting, in all that handsome typeset text, an overlooked “the the” or a bad break (a word hyphenated awkwardly at the end of a line). Whereas copyediting feels studious and constructive, proofreading has some of the compulsive tingle of the hunt.
(For more on the difference between copyediting and proofreading, see “Many Hats Editor”
’s excellent post on this very subject.)Traditional publishers typically arrange and pay for the copyediting of a book manuscript. Proofreading, however, is almost always left up to the author. This is an unfortunate arrangement.
Don’t get me wrong: authors must absolutely read their page proofs. They are the experts on their own material. Also, as The Chicago Manual of Style1 rather soberly puts it, “it is they who bear final responsibility for any errors in the published work” (2.106).
But that doesn’t mean a book’s author should be the only reader of the proofs. In checking their own proofs, authors face several obstacles that a professional proofreader doesn’t.
Most important, catching errors at this stage requires “fresh eyes”—eyes that have never seen the text before. And the author has already read the book too many times.
In reading the same text over and over, your brain follows the same neural pathways, reinforcing them with each repetition, like ruts in a dirt road. Those ruts are useful if you’re trying to memorize the first page of Moby-Dick. But they’re terrible for proofreading.
At some point after all those rereadings, you’re mostly seeing what your brain expects to see, which is what it saw the last time it read those sentences. A proofreader who’s not the author has a much better chance of noticing the unexpected.
By this point in their traditional publishing journey, however, most authors are already settled into a DIY mindset. Unless they have the funds to hire a publicist, for example, they know they’ll be doing most of the book promotion tasks themselves. So proofreading can look like just another assignment. Here, for example, are the instructions given to authors by Penn State University Press:
When you receive page proofs, you are expected to read them carefully, correct them, and return them promptly. … This is the time to confirm that the text is free of grammatical, typographical, and alignment errors and that the art is correctly placed, cropped, and sized.
Even when a publisher’s guidelines recommend that the author hire a professional proofreader, most authors will see that expense as out of reach and resign themselves to doing their own proofreading on top of everything else.
Another common problem is that after rereading the manuscript so many times in the course of producing the book, an author may be (understandably) sick of it. Best-selling novelist and CRAFT TALK author
admits to having this experience herself:I’ve been finishing up the final final FINAL edits on the novel with the first pass page proof. This is the phase when you get to see the book set in its page design and looking all pretty. It’s starting to feel like a real book.
I can tell I’m really done with this thing because I am genuinely approaching the feeling of never want[ing] to look at it again.
To some authors, reviewing the proofs of their book might sound like a formality, yet another hoop to jump through as they approach the end of an exhausting yearslong process.
Compared to the monumental effort involved in writing the book, proofreading it might seem less important. But as literary agent
emphasizes, errors do creep in during the later stages of the publishing process:The proof is the trial run printing of your book, typeset and pretty. … A proofread makes sure everything is in the right place, that the changes everyone made are reflected in the draft and no new errors were introduced. A lot of hands touch a book and every one can accidentally or erroneously introduce changes.
Another potential distraction for some authors in reading their own proofs is the itch to continue revising. But as McKean says, it’s too late for that:
At the proofreading stage, you won’t be editing sentences and adding or deleting paragraphs. In fact, if you change too much, you can be charged by the publisher for the cost of retypesetting the book. (I have literally never heard of anyone actually being charged, but it’s in your contract!!) The moral of the story is, once you get to proofreading, your book is done. The window for editing has closed.
Princeton University Press’s “page proof review” instructions include a fairly standard warning on this point:
Press policy dictates that changes at this stage be limited to corrections of typos and errors of fact, as even minor alterations are expensive to accomplish. You might incur a fee should your changes exceed your contractually stipulated alterations allowance.
Proofreading is a late eighteenth-century invention credited to Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey. Before the advent of modern publishers, an author published a book by paying a printer to print it. According to The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, by Michael Castleman,2
Early American books were typeset by young, poorly schooled apprentices, who infuriated authors by introducing typos and misspellings. Starting around 1790, Carey printed test pages, “proofs,” and corrected them before final printing. Proofreading required extra paper, ink, and labor, raising costs, which led competing printers to cluck, Authors will never pay for it. But error-free books proved so popular that authors flocked to Carey, and proofreading became standard.
Hear that, publishers? Readers prefer error-free books!
Of course they do: errors are distracting, unprofessional, and often confusing. That’s why it’s so important for the proofs to be read by someone with fresher eyes than the author’s.
The obvious solution to the DIY proofreading problem is for book publishers to provide proofreading just as they provide copyediting. A few publishers manage it. How have they worked out the economics?
If in every book contract negotiation, authors asked for proofreading to be included, would that service eventually become standard? It should: an error-free book is in everyone’s best interest.
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