I saw this on Facebook the other day and it is literally one of the most truthful things I have ever read. Because it is true.
Authors will pour their soul into trying to perfect their work— traditionally published authors will have a team aiding them, self published authors will be reliant of hiring people to aid them, or seeking free aid— but there is no such thing as perfection. There will always be an error, no matter how hard we try to have zero errors.
The truth is our brains will self correct the more we go over it and not every error, or even every sentence that we may have accidentally duplicated will be caught and will have somehow made the final draft. It happens, it happens more often than we want it too.
As I was planning out blog posts for the month I was flipping through my final book, thinking about sharing a passage and caught another stupid error. As a photographer I am a natural perfectionist so every error in my writing annoys me, infuriates me, and causes me to have to talk myself down a lot. 80/20 error split is real, while I have only caught a small handful it hurts knowing it is imperfect.
A lot readers will complain about errors, in self published works and traditional because many think that in 50,000 plus word document they will get every duplicate, every grammatical error, every nuisance that was missed. They are fresh eyes and seeing what little errors remains after meticulous work, it’s easy for them to spot the errors especially when they haven’t experienced this process themselves. Every author wants to put out the most perfect version of their work, even the most famous works were published with errors and people forget because as more prints happen they correct found errors until eventually the work appears perfect— and no one remembers the first error filled prints.
Give authors some credit. We work hard, we put a lot of time, money, energy, and work into producing a book for consumption. They all contain errors, it is but a fact of life.