The first book I published with Amazon was the YA novel Ben, the boy from nowhere. I was a tad overenthusiastic and published it before anyone but me had proofread the text. When the postman brought my first author copy I gave it to my wife to read. The photo shows all the typos she found. Earlier this year I revised the novel on the basis of several reader evaluations and gave it to ProWritingAid (https://prowritingaid.com/) to proof for me.
Oh My God.
PWA is like the spelling and grammar checker in Scrivener or Word on AI steroids.
Every page of my novel came up with an error of some kind: spelling, grammar, punctuation or just overused adjectives. Spelling errors are inexcusable, although in the first pass it highlighted all the Australian spellings, and wanted to make -ise words into -ize. I realised I had been inconsistent in my use of the “oxford comma” (I decided to go for it), as well as punctuation around direct speech (does “he said” take a comma or a period?). It also picks up stylistic quirks such as starting 3 consecutive sentences with the same word.
One of the siren traps PWA offers is to improve your writing style according to whether you are composing a scientific report, a memo or…”creative”. Its thesaurus is useful, though not much better than the standard Mac Dictionary in your on-screen dock. But beware following its advice too closely or you can end up with prose worthy of Mills & Boon. (Maybe the M&B catalogue was plundered to train its AI.)
Unfortunately, PWA can’t offer advice on the structure of the book as a whole. You still need a human editor for that. Mine advised me to cut 20,000 words out of the original book, and I followed the advice. It’s now at 60,000 words, which is more manageable for YA readers.
The Three-Dimensional Boy is a great improvement on Ben, but killing my darling has proved more difficult than it should be. Type my name into the search box in any on-line bookstore and the original title keeps turning up. It is really hard to remove a book once it is in the Amazon hive mind. A year ago I’m sure I clicked all the withdraw, unpublish, remove buttons I could find, but on-line data bases have long memories. All I can do is hope that nobody else buys Ben.
In the revised edition, my 3D boy with a penchant for bad jokes, has changed his name to Baker.