Editing books, Twitter headers, and Gravatars

I have just finished revision 3.0 of Women of the Way: Embracing the Camino. The first version was prior to the copy editor’s corrections. I should not have published the book prior to having a professional look at it, but in my rush and naivete (believing that my reviewers would catch the errors), I went ahead and released V1.0. To make matters worse, I also purchased a 100 copies. Now, I am embarrassed to even give them away.

Version 2.0 followed two iterations of change requests from my copy editor. After publication and subsequent feedback from my readers, I realized that I needed a third pass. Based on this feedback, I removed an inaccurate statement, added more descriptions, revised a few images, corrected typos, and changed the ebook paragraph formatting to include a first line indent. This formatting change was required after a reader commented that she could not distinguish between paragraphs. I now realize that formatting an ebook with before and after paragraph spacing does not ensure distinct paragraph separations when the reader changes the display font size on the device. Without the reader’s taking the time to notify me about this problem, I would never have known about the glitch.  I am so grateful to my readers who were thoughtful enough to comment on the book.

I am now happy with the third revision. I believe I have removed most of the errors, but realize that it is very difficult to cull them all out. In her post today Editing With The Kindle, Joanna Penn discusses ways to find typos and errors in books. I found her advice to not only  use the Kindle to see the book in a different format but to also listen to the text-to-voice reader most interesting. Since I do not always catch the errors when I read the text out loud, I look forward to trying out this technique. I recommend reading the comments to the post; some are very informative.

Today, HubSpot posted that Twitter Rolls Out Cover Photos: How to Add Yours Today.  I revised my Twitter book page following the instructions in the post. Once I saw the change, I decided that the existing Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) was too dull and no longer represented the book. So, I changed the Gravatar image. I replace the picture from the mural on the wall of the Iglesia Santa Marina in Sarria, Spain, with a picture of the front cover of the book. Even though the new image uploaded successfully and is correctly associated with the email address, it does not appear on Twitter or  on other places that should have the revised Gravatar. I recall how I struggled with the Gravators months ago and fear that I have reopened that can of worms. Hopefully, you will soon see the new image.

About The Author

Jane V. Blanchard

Adventurer and Author, I was born in Hartford Connecticut and now live in Sarasota, Florida.