Sunday 20 July 2014

Editors and Spelling

My sister-in-law Becky is a professional editor.  She was generous to offer her services to me so I didn't look silly.  This is one of the main points Kindle makes on their KDP website: use a professional editor.

One of the first things Becky pointed out is my title is wrong.  "Memoires" is a spelling mistake.  This escaped me because my copy of Word and its dictionary says its spelled correctly.  But sure enough, unless I'm speaking french (and missing an accent), it is not the Canadian spelling.  I googled "Memoirs" is correct.

So at first I thought "Well, that's fine.  Nobody has caught it yet, and I'm self publishing."  Then I tried to justify using it, maybe making a story out of it (because who hasn't been thrown under the bus by a spell checker or auto-correct.)  Heck even Google misspelt Google from Googol.  Now Google is a word; a verb and a noun!

Finally I gave in.  So I updated by source documents and cover pages and all the other places I had it spelled wrong.  KDP, Kobo, Kickstarter, Blogger, and Facebook were all very forgiving in letting me change the titles and descriptions.

Now let's see if it makes any difference what-so-ever.

2 comments:

  1. Another interesting thing; Amazon's spell checker thinks "Memoires" is correct spelling too.

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  2. I just assumed it was author eccentricity!

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