Does anyone else get tired of reading their own book before it's finally published?

[Guest]

Does anyone else get tired of reading their own book before it's finally published? I can probably recite this thing line for line.

[Aria]

Alex, by the time a new book is about to hit the printer, I can honestly say I hate it. Not only we have to self edit so many times, but each time it comes back from various editors and typesetting you have to read it again. I don’t know about you but my books are on the larger side, and I end up wanting to burn the thing down. I think being a writer takes a lot of patience and tenacity.

[David]

Have you tried using an AI reader to do one of the reads while you're editing? It will pause in the wrong places if your punctuation is off. It will garble misspelled words and it will just sound wrong to you when there are some other types of errors.

If you read it yourself you WILL miss things. You know what you mean already, your eye will skip past missing (or doubled up) words. Yes, you have to do that, but an AI reader for one edit won't miss a thing so it's a very useful step to take.

Word has Read Aloud on the Review Tab. Scrivener (PC version anyway) uses the same voices or you can find phone apps and PC programs or web apps to do this.

[AJ~]

Do you use betas? Send a half dozen copies out to betas and ask for line mark-ups. Some may even do it for free. Between the six of them, they should catch most issues, and you can reduce your read-throughs.

[Diane]

I just found a folder of my magazine articles published 6 years ago. Pardon my ego, but holy crap, I was knocked out how good they are and the big checks they brought. I've been in the doldrums since the pandemic started, but those old articles inspired me. In fact, the rights reverted to me after two years, so I can resell them as they are because the information in them is still valid. Of course, I would let an editor know they are reprints from a Canadian magazine.

[Aja]

Oh, yeah. An author friend of mine says that if he goes back to a book after a few years, it's like reading something someone else wrote because he's lost a lot of his connection to it.