or: Colo(u)r Me Confused

British spellings, American spellings… what’s a Canadian writer to do?

Being not only an author, but also an editor and proofreader who works for both Canadian and American companies, finicky things like international spelling and punctuation styles are something I have to pay attention to.

It used to be simple: use the spelling of the country the book is being published in. The US edition uses American spellings; the UK edition uses British spelling; and the Canadian edition uses Canadian spelling, which is essentially the same as British except with American punctuation. (Confused? So are most Canadians.) But now with e-books, the text has to suit a global market: if you publish an e-book on Amazon.com, the same e-book will be available on Amazon.co.uk; and Amazon.ca doesn’t do e-books, which means Canadians are buying from… some other country. (Once again, we’re stuck in the middle, or invisible — we’re not sure which.)

With my first three e-books, I decided that because I was publishing via Amazon, my country of publication was the US, so I would use American spellings. That was before I realized that the same e-book, not a different edition, would appear on Amazon.co.uk. (I felt no ‘betrayal’ to my native spelling because in Canada, we’re so used to seeing both, we often forget which is which. Traveller? Manoeuvre? License? Organisation? Oh, why can’t we all just get along?)

(Side note for non-Canadian readers: some Canadians care deeply about this — why should we have to Americanize everything? — while others could care less, or have barely functional spelling anyway. But we do all feel kind of stuck in the middle. We’re supposed to use British spellings — with the exception of random words like program — but if your workplace has a US head office, then what? It’s more confusing than you’d think. I recently edited a report for a Canadian hospital, and when I asked them if they wanted to use Canadian or American spellings, they enthusiastically replied “Canadian!” But then when I changed words like fetal, pediatrician, anesthesia to foetal, paediatrician, anaesthesia, they later changed them all back. I don’t think they quite understood the question.)

Back to my story… as my books appeared on more and more e-tailer sites, I realized I had no way of predicting what nationalities my audience would be. (I have fans in India — how cool!) My next book, The Frankincense Trail, was historical fiction, and for some reason I just didn’t want to see this book with American text; I’m not sure how to explain why. So I went back to Canadian.

Then I realized (realised? Oh, here we go again!) the main problem with this: most e-tailer and review sites are American, and when they feature the back blurb of the book, it appears to have typos in it. Even the spellcheck on my blog keeps redlining my ‘mistakes’. And while Canadians are very familiar with the dual-spelling issue, and most Brits are aware of it, I’m not sure whether most Americans even know about it… which means they’ll see my spellings as ‘mistakes’ rather than some quaint tradition of their neighbors/neighbors up north. And believe me, people can be really hard on self-published books… as if there has never been a typo in a traditionally published book!

To wit, one of my books was slammed in an online review for being “full of typos”. That flummoxed me at first; I could see one or two typos getting by both me and my proofreader, but many? My proofreader has an English Lit degree from Cambridge!

Cambridge — aha! That was when I realis/zed what was going on.

So now I’m wondering… what do the rest of you Canadian authors who are e-publishing do? Which program(me) do you favo(u)r? And for you readers out there, do you notice, or care? Were you even aware that different spellings existed?

Let the comments roll in… I’m eager to hear your thoughts!