When your errors aren't caught till many years later

[sunaynaprasad]

I first submitted book 1 of my series for publication in spring 2013. Before I did that, though, I submitted it to a pre-publication review site and received a B for grammar. However, since then, people, and even I, have spotted errors in it that the editors didn't catch, not even in the updated version, which I re-published two years ago. Just yesterday, someone pointed out two errors, which I obviously fixed. But I can't help but feel pretty embarrassed that I published the story twice and updated it many times, thinking that there were no errors. Even Amazon KDP couldn't point out the errors.
With the read aloud feature in Word that I just discovered a year ago, it has been a bit of a savior. But now I am considering a software, such as Autocrit and Grammarly, in addition to actual person editors. I hope it works as the reviews did make it sound promising.
But how could I and other people miss so many errors read and reads in a period of seven and a half years? Is it okay and normal to feel embarrassed about this?

[LCLee]

I had to pull a book back because of my self edit. I then had a professional edit done after that and went through it again myself. So the last big round of reviews of close to a hundred people they found two more which I have since fixed. It seems there is no end to the changes. I was able to challenge a couple of the critiques as they were totally wrong, so keep their feet to the fire and don't let them bully you into changes that are not needed.

[vranger]

Proofreading is hard. I finally wrote my own app to help with it. I load the novel into a database, then run a stored procedure that breaks it down into individual sentences. Then the app presents one sentence at a time, at random.

Proofreading lapses happen when the proofreader becomes EITHER bored or interested in the material. Both factors cause them to miss things. Also, long paragraphs are apt to cause proofing misses.

So by only looking at one sentence without any "noise" around it, I catch errors I might otherwise read past. Over time I've added other features to point out possible homonym errors, overused words, cliches, copulas, and a few other things.

Below the sentence being examined, I show the five sentences before and five sentences after so I can refer to context when I need to. That helps out with things like catching when I've used the wrong character name.

[Bloggsworth]

Wood for trees.