My wife, author Kim Conrey, and I are in the pre-publication twilight period, making the final tweaks to our books before the text is set in proverbial stone by our respective publishers for the first printing. The writing is done but seeking reviews and reviewing the text now consume our attention, and we’re keenly aware time is running out. During this period, the term “deadline” becomes more ominous, with our reputations, if not our artistic lives, on the line.

I’m in the midst of chasing blurbs for my historical novel Return to Hardscrabble Road. Blurbs are those compliments you see on the book cover and the first inside pages from recognizable authors, which assure potential buyers that they’ll be spending wisely if they purchase the book. One benefit of being a longtime writer and active in the literary community is that I am friends with numerous other authors, all of whom are better known than me, have garnered sterling reviews and/or won notable awards, and sometimes can be found on the New York Times bestseller list. The flip side is that these are very busy people working on their own books, so it takes some hustle and chutzpah to secure their endorsement.

Kim has already received her blurbs. Her current task is the review of each chapter in her sci-fi romance Stealing Ares, Book One in the Ares Ascending Series. She is confirming every piece of punctuation is correct, any extraneous words are removed, and every sentence, paragraph, and chapter provides an excellent reading experience. In mid-July, my publisher will ask me to do the same for the book I think of as Scrabble Harder.

Word of mouth is still the way a book goes from languishing in obscurity to becoming a hit. Thus, this pre-publication period is a stressful time because we’re aware that any errors we overlook—and any new mistakes we inadvertently introduce—will be noted by every reader considering what kind of online review to leave and whether to recommend our novel to friends/family/book clubs. We imagine eagle-eyed readers snorting and muttering in disgust, “Idiot, that verb should be subjunctive, and you wouldn’t know how to use a semicolon correctly if your life depended on it.”

Don’t publishers edit, to guarantee their books are perfect? Publishers might task their overworked employees with this—or outsource that job to busy contractors—and impose tight deadlines in either case. These people are as apt to miss typos and other problems as anyone else. Or the publishers rely on programs such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid, which are notorious for taking perfectly acceptable terms and turning them into gibberish or hilarious malaprops, just like the autocorrect on your phone. Thus, the ultimate responsibility lies with the author—and it can bring us to tears.

While making a 90,000-word manuscript flawless is a nearly impossible undertaking, it’s easier to ensure that the characters are engaging, the stakes remain high throughout the story, and the plot keeps the reader turning the pages. Even at this late stage, Kim is discovering ways to insert cliffhangers at the end of chapters so there will be even more reasons not to set down her book. We authors feel perverse satisfaction when readers tell us they have lost sleep and sometimes forgotten to eat and do other necessaries because they were so wrapped up in our stories. Sometimes, that magic happens right at the very end, just before we turn the book over to the publisher for the last time. It’s almost never too late to make a good tale even better. We’ll be improving our books for you right up until the publishers pry them from our fingers.