Lax editing standards as long as updates are free?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Staff-size or process issues could be part of the problem.

I know, for instance, that many novels have at least 3 editors work them over before publication...and that's not including the guys & gals who do the brute force typo/punctuation stuff. I'm talking about people whose job it is to read the material in its entirety and with attention to the minutiae and see if the plot flows, if continuity has been affected by edits, if the quality of the writing is up to snuff, and so forth. These people are going through the text with a writing implement making notes, etc., just to make sure they're putting out a quality product.

Most writers hate them; all writers need them.

And even with that, the occasional typo slips through. I caught one in Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, about 70% of the way in. It was minor, but jarring enough at the time that I had to back up and re-read certain portions of the book just to make sure I wasn't going nuts. I didn't see any other errors, though.

(And at this moment, I don't recall exactly what it was. I think it was something like the use of a homonym- something most live editors would catch.)

 

[SiderisAnon]

In general, it strikes me that language skills have declined in the past 20 years in the business world and online. I see things daily that make me cringe. I expect a certain number of mistakes, because I myself have prepared large documents and then later found a mistake I and others missed. Too many people I deal with seem to think that the mistakes don't matter or even glorify in their mistakes (like those idiots who type like they're lol cats or something).


As someone who has been a DM/GM for more than 25 years now, I don't know that the overall level of editing is less so much as the availability of cheap publishing routes so that you get to see the products with the really bad editing and the really, really bad writing.

In the late 1980's, there were professionally produced products on the game store shelves that were so horribly edited they wouldn't have gotten past my high school newspaper staff. I have seen products from the 80's and 90's that were downright unreadable. These generally did not last because most publishers simply could not keep making a profit on really bad product and so stopped publishing. (There is one big exception in my mind, but I won't name names.)

In the last ten years, I have seen a lot of PDF products which are truly badly written and/or poorly edited. Though they are sold, I have a hard time considering them to be "professional" products, but think of them more in terms of fan creations which someone went to a lot of trouble to put together. (Even if I am paying a few bucks for them.)

The difference in my mind is that while historically you had to have some money to pay for a print run and get it distributed, currently anyone with a PC and some software can produce a PDF for publication. There's both no weeding out process before publication and no marketplace death for someone whose product is mediocre in its editing because they were never going to sell a thousand copies in the first place.


I will not buy a paper book and pay paper book prices from a company that cannot edit their product properly. If I find that I have, I will never buy anything else from that company. I am more forgiving of the PDF only publishers because I do not hold them to the same standards. They are also a lot cheaper to buy, so I can be less picky.