Glitches in Self-Pub Works

I recently read a self-published book, the title of which is irrelevant. It was produced by a printing company, where the author was required to furnish not only the manuscript, but the layout and cover. The cover was the best part of the book. The story had potential (although erratic and overwritten); out of curiosity, I finished it.

I have read aesthetically-rough fiction from traditional publishers, but those at least had a professional layout and had been scrutinized by a copy editor. This one—OMG—Not.

I have no gripe with self-publishing, I do it myself, but if a writer wants a book to be taken seriously, some basics have to be considered. Here are a few tips:
• Punctuation should be correctly rendered. Three periods (...) does not an ellipse make.
• Ellipsis are not followed by any other punctuation ["What do you mean...! you have to go?"]. Nor are they followed (or preceded) by blank spaces (same with em dashes).
• Uppercase letters should rarely be used for emphatic dialogue ["what WE did, did NOT cause what happened"]; description before dialogue should not end with a comma. [Green eyes betrayed her, "I'm sure you do."].
• Regarding layout, the text alignment in a professional book is justified, with widow and orphan control, usually with 11pt type and type kerning so lines of text have uniformity.
• Quotation marks and apostrophes must be consistent throughout the text, not curly marks to start dialogue with straight apostrophes in contractions.

Liberal use of Strunk and White (Elements of Style) would have helped, as well as referring to Chicago Manual of Style. A copy editor would have caught ninety percent of these errors, as well as when the character names that changed mid-scene. (I say this, although I read a disastrous book from a traditional publisher where a character’s name changed three times in six pages!)

Come on, authors. If you want to be professional, work professionally! Get a copy editor and invest in a good text layout program. Use of those will certainly make a significant difference in reader response to all your hard work.

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