Wednesday, June 12, 2019

A Gentle Reminder

Time again for a gentle reminder...

PROOFREAD YOUR MARKETING MATERIALS!

Twice in the past few days, I've seen marketing materials with typos in them.  One, the author used your instead of you're.  The other, the author used there instead of their - twice in the same blurb.  :headdesk:

Seriously, folks, this shouldn't be that hard.  I mean, we're talking a few short paragraphs.

The first one was in a Facebook group.  So, free advertising.  The second was in a marketing newsletter that they obviously had to pay for.  Which makes it doubly egregious. 

FB group marketing... Sometimes shit happens.  Lord knows I'm not perfect, and I've made mistakes.  Which I then catch and edit.  Yes, you can edit FB posts.  There's a little ellipsis looking thing in the upper right corner of your status update.  When you click it, you get a dropdown menu...
And there's an 'edit post' option.  So, if you see an error, you can fix the error. 

Once, I had to go back and fix a half dozen marketing posts because for some stupid reason the UK sales link was broken and I didn't notice until I'd posted the damn thing all over the place.  Caught it, fixed it.  It was only live to users for about ten minutes. 

In marketing efforts you've paid for, fixing the flaw isn't necessarily possible.  Here, you really need to pay attention.  Because once you've sent it out to the powers that be, it's stuck there.  Well, I guess you might be able to contact them if you have enough time.  And then you can hope someone over there is paying attention and is nice enough to allow you to fix the error.  But I wouldn't count on it.  Proof, proof, proof. 

Otherwise, you might as well put on your big red nose and floppy feet because you'll look like a clown.

In either of the above cases, the author may have proofed the holy hell out of their manuscript to make it all shiny and clean, but their marketing materials tell the world that they probably didn't bother.  All that work down the drain. 

So, yeah, a gentle reminder this morning... proofread your stuff, folks.  It's kind of important.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, if a writer doesn't know the difference between "there," "they're," and "their," in their blurb, I'm not gonna go there, because they're either too lazy or not smart enough to write something that will hold my interest. Yes, I am a literary snob. LOL

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