The Proof Is In The Puzzling

I’m currently reading a gripping mystery that I found for free on Amazon (oh, cloud-connected Kindle app on my iPhone, you’re so beautiful), but what’s taking me out of it is that it’s quite clear that the story was originally written in Third Person Omniscient and then very sloppily switched to First Person after the fact. There are regular personal pronoun errors such as these:

(…Whose fingers are you licking again? The old lady you’re talking to? That’s sort of creepy and awkward.)

Add the fact that the omniscient aspects, where we hear the (often completely redundant) internal monologue of another character that’s not the protagonist, have simply been changed to italics, and it’s pretty chaotic and confusing. Which is sad, because it takes away from the small-town murder mystery that I’m quite enjoying.

I know I do a lot of complaining about these stories that I download for nothing and consume greedily, but it is a little disappointing that things like this, as well as simple typos and grammatical errors, are rife in the market. I understand that most of these books are bashed out pretty quickly and uploaded by their author, but a little proofreading and editing go a long way.

Back in the day when I wrote fanfic (no, I’m not telling you what fandoms) it was a necessity in some communities to find yourself a Beta reader (or maybe two or three), who’d go over your story and make sure everything made sense before you uploaded. I had some pretty okay Betas, who would just have a quick skim for typos and proclaim it all fine, and some excellent Betas who would question the authenticity of canon references, help me rewrite sentences that weren't flowing, and even assisted me with the plot. I beta-read myself a few times, and tried to be as helpful as I could, to make sure none of my charges ever uploaded a page that wasn't as perfect as we could make it.

It'd be nice if we could see a bit more of that in the self-published ebook community these days.