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

[Ourph]

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

Apparently when the man declared, "You too can earn up to hundreds of dollars writing roleplaying game products!" he wasn't talking about the guy who is so busy making $52,000 a year who doesn't have time to edit his own work.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

I just don't buy this line of reasoning. Most error-ridden RPG books have numerous contributors listed in their credits. You don't need to hire a professional copy editor at great expense to work a book over. The vast majority of errors that people are complaining about are glaring, you can't miss them if you actually sit down and read through the text (stuff like missing words, duplicated words, repeated sentences, etc.). If you've got 3-4 people working on a project it would take about one 8-hour day to divide the book into sections and have each of those people simply read a section thoroughly to catch those kinds of glaring errors. Do a quick spell/grammar check after that (let's say one more person working another half day) and you've probably eliminated 90% of the errors people here are complaining about. This is not the Herculean task that some people make it out to be. I find it very difficult to believe that putting in that minimal effort toward quality control is going to break the bank on a project. It simply requires the companies in question to make quality editing a priority rather than an afterthought.

I normally agree with Ourph about most things, but this is a rare exception.

After you've been staring at the same text for a lengthy period of time making minor alterations or changes, it does something to your brain. I'm going through this at the moment; I can stare at one of the couple hundred pages of OSRIC for hours and not spot a mistake. If I show it to my wife, she can still pick out a mistake on almost all of them. Almost every single page. And someone coming to it fresh will pick out others again.

That's a collaborative work with upwards of a dozen individuals contributing, too.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

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).

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but if so that is an amazingly ill-considered statement. I once worked for a publisher and this was a joke commonly said between the editors I supported. Editors with PhD's would constantly snark about how the best-selling authors with PhD's could write so poorly. Often these very intelligent and educated authors were incredulous there were any errors in what they wrote. Authors just don't have a clue when they make errors after having stared at it for so long. They've internalized it all already and seeing it in print before their eyes doesn't help because already see it in their mind. Education and training are enough for only the rarest human being.

When I wrote my senior paper the number one bit of advice I was given by everyone in my department and the writing assistance center was to hand over what I had written to someone else to get a second person's perspective on it. Not to have them pick over the details of subject matter, but to find simple writing errors and lack of clarity.

 

[guildofblades]

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

Precious few.

Understand this clearly though. If it is costing a company $25 per hour for an employee it does NOT mean the employee is actually getting $25 per hour.

Here are just some of the associated costs for having an employee:

1) Federal Employment tax,
2) Unemployment Taxes.

(Those first two average out to be between 12-15% of what the employee's actual salary is).

3) Extra Insurance.
4) Extra work space
5) More accounting. Human resources labor to handle any benefits programs offered to the emploeyees.
6) Paid vacation time
7) The cost of any actual benefits offered to the employee.

Simply put, if its costing the company $25 an hour to hire an employee, the employee themselves is lucky if they see $15 per hour of that in actual salary. Lucky.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

After you've been staring at the same text for a lengthy period of time making minor alterations or changes, it does something to your brain.

This is very true. So very true.

A writer is too familiar with her own work to edit it flawlessly. After writing, re-writing, and several re-readings, the words become partially memorized. As they are read, the eyes will naturally pass over them, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your mind is "reading" them anymore.

Take, for example, the study showing that as long as a word began and ended with the correct letters (most of the letters in-between could be jumbled) the reader could still understand the word at a glance.

A fresh set of eyes is always needed for a professional product.

In college, it was driven into our heads again and again that anything we submitted for publication should be error-free or it would immediately go into the trash. Real world experience quickly taught us the opposite, but reinforced the need for that kind of unrealistic mindset (ie, a writer should always strive for perfection, even if that goal is unattainable, because it helps everyone out down the line). The same goes for copy editors: they are told that anything less that 100% error-free text is unacceptable. In reality, even the best copy editors make mistakes.

Making matters worse is the meddling of a third party on down the line. Lay-out artists and publishers shouldn't be changing text at the last minute unless they're willing to put that product through yet another round of quality control. Far too often, last minute attempts to "fix" small mistakes cause even more problems. There's nothing more maddening for a copy editor than to have her reputation (or mental health) tarnished over something she fixed but her boss ruined... but it's pretty common.

Yes, proof readers and copy editors get "beat up on" in threads like these. But how many of these people being criticized are actually trained to do this job as opposed to being a wife, husband or friend of the publisher who simply has a careful eye? That's fine for a .pdf selling for $2.00, but not for a full-priced book.

Bottom line: no one is perfect, so pay someone qualified to cover your ass, unless you are certain that your target market doesn't give a darn.

 

[Ourph]

After you've been staring at the same text for a lengthy period of time making minor alterations or changes, it does something to your brain. I'm going through this at the moment; I can stare at one of the couple hundred pages of OSRIC for hours and not spot a mistake. If I show it to my wife, she can still pick out a mistake on almost all of them. Almost every single page. And someone coming to it fresh will pick out others again.

Two points. 1) That's why I suggest above having Betty who normally answers the phones and ships the orders sit at a desk for 8 hours and read it. There are fresh eyes available if you need them. 2) From what I saw of the first draft of OSRIC, it was hundreds of times better in the editing department than the products I'm speaking to. I write quite a bit of technical stuff for my job (things that need to be very professionally done) and I always have someone else proof my work, but they don't catch mistakes like duplicated words, misspellings, missing words, added words, cut-off sentences, words without spaces between them, etc. because I do a spell/grammar check and my own read through before handing it off to someone else and I catch all of the obvious errors. That's what I'm complaining about here, not companies who miss errors but companies who don't even put in the minimal effort it takes to catch obvious errors. As far as I could tell, OSRIC was mostly free of those kinds of obvious errors from the initial release, which further strengthens my point AFAIAC. If a non-profit, free product can be released that contains maybe 1% (at most) of the errors that you might find in a similar sized book from, for example, Black Industries that people pay upwards of $30 for, then it should be possible for the company actually charging money for their product to achieve a similar level of quality.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but if so that is an amazingly ill-considered statement. I once worked for a publisher and this was a joke commonly said between the editors I supported. Editors with PhD's would constantly snark about how the best-selling authors with PhD's could write so poorly. Often these very intelligent and educated authors were incredulous there were any errors in what they wrote. Authors just don't have a clue when they make errors after having stared at it for so long. They've internalized it all already and seeing it in print before their eyes doesn't help because already see it in their mind. Education and training are enough for only the rarest human being.

When I wrote my senior paper the number one bit of advice I was given by everyone in my department and the writing assistance center was to hand over what I had written to someone else to get a second person's perspective on it. Not to have them pick over the details of subject matter, but to find simple writing errors and lack of clarity.

See my responses to P&P above (except in reverse order). I'm not complaining about tense changes or rules minutia here, I'm complaining about obvious errors that anyone with the ability to write a coherent sentence would see if they simply looked over the text (even the original author).

Understand this clearly though. If it is costing a company $25 per hour for an employee it does NOT mean the employee is actually getting $25 per hour.

Here are just some of the associated costs for having an employee:

1) Federal Employment tax,
2) Unemployment Taxes.

(Those first two average out to be between 12-15% of what the employee's actual salary is).

3) Extra Insurance.
4) Extra work space
5) More accounting. Human resources labor to handle any benefits programs offered to the emploeyees.
6) Paid vacation time
7) The cost of any actual benefits offered to the employee.

Simply put, if its costing the company $25 an hour to hire an employee, the employee themselves is lucky if they see $15 per hour of that in actual salary. Lucky.

I think you're missing my point. I'm specifically saying these companies don't need to hire extra people, they simply need to re-prioritize the activities of their extant employees. The cost to change those priorities is not the cost of hiring a new employee it's the cost of losing out on 8 hours of whatever work that employee would otherwise be doing. If you take the guy who normally ships your packages, answers your phones and does your billing, sit him down at a desk for 8 hours and have him proofread 4 chapters of the next book you are shipping, you are losing the cost of whatever 8 hours of his normal work is worth to you. You are NOT re-paying the entire cost of his employment because you'd be paying for taxes, insurance, work space, accounting, vacation and benefits for that employee anyway.

Then the question becomes, is shipping a quality product more important to you than being a day behind on your shipping and billing? IMO it should be, because companies who ship lots of sloppy product on time are still shipping sloppy product that's not worth the $30 price tag they are charging.

 

[EyeontheMountain]

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer

in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is

taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a

toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is

bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.>

Read the above quote quickly.

Then look back on it. I think you will find it interesting.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

Spelling and grammar mistakes in printed products annoy me, but crunch/game mistakes usually do not.

 

[guildofblades]

>>If you take the guy who normally ships your packages, answers your phones and does your billing, sit him down at a desk for 8 hours and have him proofread 4 chapters of the next book you are shipping, you are losing the cost of whatever 8 hours of his normal work is worth to you. You are NOT re-paying the entire cost of his employment because you'd be paying for taxes, insurance, work space, accounting, vacation and benefits for that employee anyway.<<

Um, you sure are. You take an employee off shipping and order processing, printing, writing or whatever you had them doing, ten that becomes work that is not getting done. You then have to either hire someone to do that instead or you have to ask your existing employees to work longer hours which either means you are paying overtime rates by the end of the week if they are hourly, or your salaried employees simply start to get less pleased about the company they work for it they have to work an extra 8 hours a week on a regular basis (And disgruntled salaried employees can lead to loss in many other ways).

For most publishers it is simply boiling down to a matter of perceived consumer priorities and the assignment of limited resources that need to be maximized in order to turn a profit on low volume niche industry products. You can try and twist the math any number of ways, but 2+2+2 simply will not equal 9 now matter how many times you count it.

The drive in recent years to require hard cover products, full color interiors, full color artwork, fancier graphical book layouts and more advertising and marketing expenses to maintain a presence within the distribution network has all led to a changed priority in the funding for aspects of product development. The current consensus tends to be that colorful hard covers, flashy artwork and pre launch buzz marketing are all too essential to ignore as a publisher and to do those things well comes with a lot of cost and those fund must come from somewhere. Without an increase in overall sales, logic dictates it must come from reduced overhead (and you can only reduce overhead so much) and other areas of product development.....you know, things like writing costs, research and development, play testing, editing, etc.

I hear you that editing is important to you. And it is obvious it is important to other people as well. I am just saying that for the average publisher the sales and revenues simply aren't there to put the total resources into every area of product development that would be absolutely ideal. It becomes a choice of prioritization for each publisher and generally of 5-8 important design and production points, most successful publishers will manage to hit all but one or two of them. But its nigh to impossible to hit them all.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

 

[Ourph]

Um, you sure are. You take an employee off shipping and order processing, printing, writing or whatever you had them doing, ten that becomes work that is not getting done. You then have to either hire someone to do that instead or you have to ask your existing employees to work longer hours which either means you are paying overtime rates by the end of the week if they are hourly, or your salaried employees simply start to get less pleased about the company they work for it they have to work an extra 8 hours a week on a regular basis (And disgruntled salaried employees can lead to loss in many other ways).

Why do you keep implying that I'm trying to make this more than a zero sum game? I said above, you assign priorities. You don't need to make your employees work longer hours or hire more or leave anyone disgruntled. You decide it's worth it to be 8 hours behind on writing, shipping, billing, filing, whatever in order to ship quality products. You live with the consequences. No one ever went broke because they lost 8 hours in the shipping department. Is shipping important? Sure. Is 8 extra hours of shipping work worth gaining the reputation of a company that puts out sub-par products that aren't worth what you are charging for them? Obviously some companies think so, but I would beg to differ. The companies who have the worst editing problems average a new release per month. Are you honestly saying they can't afford to lose 24-32 man-hours a month from other tasks to make sure their products aren't embarassingly sloppy?

For most publishers it is simply boiling down to a matter of perceived consumer priorities and the assignment of limited resources that need to be maximized in order to turn a profit on low volume niche industry products. You can try and twist the math any number of ways, but 2+2+2 simply will not equal 9 now matter how many times you count it.

I'm not twisting any math. I've been saying all along this is a zero sum game. Companies make choices according to their priorities. What I take issue with is the assertion that it's fiscally impossible for these companies to ship books that aren't full of egregious editing errors. They choose to ship their products that way because they feel they can get away with it, not because it's impossible for them to do otherwise.

The drive in recent years to require hard cover products, full color interiors, full color artwork, fancier graphical book layouts and more advertising and marketing expenses to maintain a presence within the distribution network has all led to a changed priority in the funding for aspects of product development. The current consensus tends to be that colorful hard covers, flashy artwork and pre launch buzz marketing are all too essential to ignore as a publisher and to do those things well comes with a lot of cost and those fund must come from somewhere.

This "consensus" changes every few years (which sort of calls into question whether it's an actual consensus). Large hard-backs were supposed to be the flagship of the new WFRP line, but BI has since backed down on that and shifted much of their upcoming product line to smaller softcover books because they decided the hardbacks were just not economical enough. Could it be that their reputation for poor editing is part of what discouraged consumers from buying the expensive hardbacks? I think it's a pretty fair bet that it didn't help. I know that, personally, I haven't paid full cover price for a BI Warhammer book since I bought the core book several years ago. All of my subsequent purchases have been through discount retailers or from the used book market for the specific reason that I'm willing to pay $20-25 for a nice, shiny hardback book with poor editing, but I'm not willing to pay $40-45 dollars for it.

I hear you that editing is important to you. And it is obvious it is important to other people as well. I am just saying that for the average publisher the sales and revenues simply aren't there to put the total resources into every area of product development that would be absolutely ideal. It becomes a choice of prioritization for each publisher and generally of 5-8 important design and production points, most successful publishers will manage to hit all but one or two of them. But its nigh to impossible to hit them all.

I'm sorry, but what we're talking about here isn't on/off switches (can I afford it or can't I) but cost/return ratios. To me, the fact that these companies are looking at the cost/return ratio of spending 4 hours to do a simple spellcheck of their product before sending it to printing and saying they can't afford it speaks volumes about how much they value quality in their product and the regard in which they hold their consumers. If THEY don't think their product is worth that kind of investment, then it should come as no surprise if their consumers don't attach a great deal of value to the product either.