[Rant] Do editing/proofreading errors drive you mad, too?

[Wombat]

They do drive me mad ... mainly because I am a professional editor/proofreader...

 

[werk]

I hate them.

It does cause me to buy less product. Seriously.

 

[helium3]

An idea: Perhaps if they didn't have such insanely high production values for these books aside from the actual written content, they could jack up the quality of the writing significantly. I would gladly buy $15 softcover books printed on less extravagant paper stock with fewer illustrations and frills in greyscale. I will take care of my books even more meticulously and much appreciate the cheaper price. I don't care about the paper stock being ridiculously nice or the full color illustrations taking up a fourth (or more) of each page as they stand now. They do so little for me. Just give me well-edited writing that has no significant contradictions or errors of logic that damage playability or the credibility of the book.

I can only assume that the high production values exist because it's believed that these are necessary for the book to even sell. I have no clue if this is true or not, as I don't publish, but it seems to follow logically.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

I can only assume that the high production values exist because it's believed that these are necessary for the book to even sell. I have no clue if this is true or not, as I don't publish, but it seems to follow logically.

Production values matter to me. Sorry, call me shallow if you want to but for me to plunk down my cash for a game book there has to be a mixture of good content AND good production values. It's one of the reasons I stopped picking up Mongoose's books, I just thought that they just looked bad. Like I said before poor editing wont put me off of a book. If it's a 128pg book and there's a critical error on every page then I can understand, but errors here and there that dont actually stop me from using the material in the book doesnt put me off that much.

The other thing is I dont think that most of the people who buy WOTC's books could give a crap about the errors. Oh, maybe a few of them might beef, but ENworld seems to be in the minority of gamers (THANK GOD) when it somes to commplaing about stuff like this. Even if everyone in this thread stopped buying the books I doubt that it would matter much more than a blip on thier radar.

 

[helium3]

Production values matter to me. Sorry, call me shallow if you want to but for me to plunk down my cash for a game book there has to be a mixture of good content AND good production values.

Well, the types of errors I'm talking about aren't misplaced commas and using "its" when you should use "it's." I'm talking about glaringly obvious stuff that I find it hard to imagine being missed in the first place. But, again, I don't have any experience in publishing so what seems easy to fix to me probably isn't without spending oodles of additional cash.

As an aside, when you say "good production values" what do you mean?

 

[Ourph]

So, an extra 32 man hours at roughly $25 per hour = $800.

For a book retailing at $30 and with a cost of goods sold (COGS) running $7, that leaves a gross profit of $5 per book when sold at wholesale. Slice away conventional operating expenses and you get down to maybe $2 left per book.

Holy cash-cow Batman! How many RPG companies pay their employees $25 an hour?!

I can understand that a professional editor might charge that much, but if we're talking about Joe, Pete and Steve (the guys who wrote the book) and Betty (the secretary down the hall) just reading through the book to find obvious errors I can hardly imagine their time is costing the company $25/man-hour. If so, I think I've just pinpointed why so many RPG companies have a hard time staying in business.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

As an aside, when you say "good production values" what do you mean?

Just that I like the books that are printed on the nice quality paper (when I still do buy books, I'm mostly a PDF person) and the nice art and decent formatting and spacing.

If I wanted a book printed on crappy paper I just buy the PDF and print it out myself and have it bound at Kinko's for 4-5 dollars.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

Holy cash-cow Batman! How many RPG companies pay their employees $25 an hour?!

I can understand that a professional editor might charge that much, but if we're talking about Joe, Pete and Steve (the guys who wrote the book) and Betty (the secretary down the hall) just reading through the book to find obvious errors I can hardly imagine their time is costing the company $25/man-hour. If so, I think I've just pinpointed why so many RPG companies have a hard time staying in business.

Stop making sense or talking about the economic reality of the RPG buisness, there's no place for that here.

And I'm not saying that as someone who's in the buisness, I'm saying that as someone who's been following this thread and has seen a few people in the buisness come in and pretty much say close to the exact same thing that you just said and get ignored.

These same people who are here going on about the editing wouldnt be willing to take the pay cut to edit / proofread the same books that theyre complaining about. Now I'm not saying that they shouldnt complain, just the opposite. Even though the errors thing doesnt bother me that much, I can see how it can annoy the crap out of someone else. But there is a context here and that is there isnt alot of money to hire decent proofreaders or editors in this industry. I'm guessing that most real proofreaders have real jobs that actually pay and would prefer that than to be working for close to nothing and then getting reamed by a bunch of message board folk for a few errors. Better to get paid well and get the same treatment...

 

[Ourph]

These same people who are here going on about the editing wouldnt be willing to take the pay cut to edit / proofread the same books that theyre complaining about. Now I'm not saying that they shouldnt complain, just the opposite. Even though the errors thing doesnt bother me that much, I can see how it can annoy the crap out of someone else. But there is a context here and that is there isnt alot of money to hire decent proofreaders or editors in this industry. I'm guessing that most real proofreaders have real jobs that actually pay and would prefer that than to be working for close to nothing and then getting reamed by a bunch of message board folk for a few errors. Better to get paid well and get the same treatment...

But my point is that these publishers don't really need to hire proofreaders to catch 90% of the stupid errors that make their way into the products. If you have the writing skill to actually sit down and write an RPG book you should certainly have the skill to catch obvious errors like....

"Such an action requires the chamacter to roll on the Chaos Mutation table at +20_the roll. Any result higher than than 80 indicates the character is become irrevocably tainted."

Most of those errors would be caught by a simple grammar/spellcheck. The others are so obvious that anyone with a standard high school education in English should catch them on a single, thorough, read-through. The people who actually do the writing and work at the companies publishing these books are more than qualified to edit their own work for these kinds of mistakes (if they aren't maybe they shouldn't be making their living as writers in the first place). The choice isn't 1) hire a professional proofreader/editor vs. 2) publish unproofread work. The choice is 1) take the time to do our own proofreading vs. 2) send a messy book out the door so we can use the extra time to start writing our next messy book.

 

[helium3]

"Such an action requires the chamacter to roll on the Chaos Mutation table at +20_the roll. Any result higher than than 80 indicates the character is become irrevocably tainted."

I can get paid more than $25 an hour to look for errors like that? I'm TOTALLY getting out of Engineering.