Students applying to college can learn from a mistake I made.
My new book is officially on sale. I’ve spent almost an entire year working every day to bring it to fruition. I self-published it, so I’ve been involved in everything from the cover design, to the promotional website, to the selection of professionals to edit and lay it out. But since its release, I’ve learned that there are almost two dozen typos in the book. That news has deflated a lot of my excitement.
I know that I’m a lousy proofreader. So once I finished all the writing and revising, I hired an outside copyediting service to scrub it clean. But they didn’t catch everything. Then when the book was converted into an ebook, the conversion software removed all the words that were italicized. There were also some random deletions of text when the book was laid out to print. I’ve never self-published a book before, and I didn’t even know those sorts of things happened.
Here’s the lesson: none of those excuses matter.
It’s my book with my name on it—they’re my typos. Nobody who spends money to buy it and is distracted by the errors will care what the reasons are. They’re my fault. I should have made sure that the final version was error-free. I could have asked one of several expert proofreaders I know and trust to give it a second read. I'm sure my mom, who taught high school English for 30 years, would gladly have taken a red pen to it. But instead of taking more responsibility for the finished product, I took less.
The lesson here is not that you shouldn’t rely on people you trust to help you—you should. But students, you are the ones applying to college, not your parents, not your counselor, not anybody that your parents hire to help you. Don't wait for someone else to take charge of the process, to research colleges, look up deadlines, or fill out your applications for you. Those are your responsibilities–don't abdicate them ("abdicate" means to give up or relinquish, and it shows up all the time on the SAT).
If big mistakes happen with your application, you won’t get to point fingers at someone else and claim it's their fault, just like I can’t blame someone else for the mistakes in my book.
The owner of the editing service I hired apologized and offered to edit the book again for free. I'm taking him up on it, but also having several people I know and trust look it over, too. I’ll spend the next couple days making sure we’ve caught everything, then working with the designers to get the changes made in our layouts, then resubmitting them to the sales outlets like Amazon and the iBookstore. I’m hoping to have updated versions available in the next few weeks.
I'm proud of the content in the book but embarassed about the mistakes. For those of you who’ve bought the book, I apologize. Thanks for your patronage and your patience.
katiegate says
Even if it’s not as perfect as you’d like it, it’s still the best college admissions book I’ve ever read – by far.