Errata Gone Wild
From Digital Book Today -Victoria Brown author of Zemsta, via Anthony Wessel
We all know the bane of indie authors is that nothing is proofed properly, and self-published books are rife with typos. Or that’s what everyone seems to think.
According to Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/qUMMOk): “For readers who find humanity in orthographic quirks, these are great times. Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere….
Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?
“Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.”
Here are some interesting typos I came upon while trawling the web:
• In the book Probing the Mind of a Serial Killer the topic matter is serial killers. Whenever the author referenced sexual sadists it was “sexual saddest.” This was repeated over and over and over….
• A newspaper’s sports section reporting on a basketball player’s injuries: “He had a herniated disk…but they used a “c” instead of an “s” in disk….
• In one of Kim Harrison’s Hollow books, every time they mention the brakes on a car, it’s spelled “breaks,” except when the brake line breaks and then it’s reversed so the break line brakes.
What are your favorite typos?
Read the rest at Spelling Errors in Books
~Contributed by guest blogger Kat Sheridan
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
“What are your favorite typos?”
Kat,
OTHER PEOPLES!
Last night, I was going over a 10,000 word PWP smut story I wrote over a year ago. It is my most popular story on FFN by far. I found several errors and I had gone over it many times before.
I’m quite hard on them with other people, but the damn things are so easy to make, even if you’re looking hard at your own stuff.
WTF is it?:)
brendan
Proofing is very hard–it’s like playing whack-a-mole. I worked on a professional journal for two years. We had twenty people reviewing about ten articles per issue. You’d think those articles would be spotless. Not even. Proofing is truly a thankless task.
It’s impossible to proof your own material unless you had a head injury and forgot that you wrote it.
Not impossible. I’m pretty good at proofreading my own writing. Maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule.
I proof my own work. It just requires a specific mindset that you don for the job.
“I proof my own work. It just requires a specific mindset that you don for the job.”
Catana,
If you’d care to give a little more detail on how you arrive at that mindset, I’m fairly certain that I’m not the only one who would be very interested.
Perhaps a post of it’s own?
brendan
Three tricks I use:
- Read it aloud to yourself, and not too fast.
- Print it out.
- Let it sit for at least a few days and fill your head with other things in the meantime (another project or reward yourself with a movie or gaming marathon, perhaps – whatever your hobbies are).
A combination of the three works best.
I occassionally get paid to proofread work for others and I would never in a million years think that I could proof my own work sufficiently. I know EDITORS who have other people proof their work rahter than trusting themselves.
When a word like sadist is corrected to saddest repeatedly, I suspect the Cupertino effect. See here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html
Humans generally make one-off errors. Screwing up repeatedly is often computer-assisted.
“Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.”
Publishing houses have been using freelance proofreaders since AT LEAST the 1980s. I was one in the 90s. Digital technology has nothing to do with it, unless by “digital technology” they mean the advent of the personal computer and word processing.
This change occurred when the small publishing houses were bought up by huge conglomerates and the bean-counters decided in-house staffs could be cheaply replaced with freelancers. Of course production values will suffer, but why should the bean-counters care?
Actually, in some of these cases you can blame ‘digital technology’ — or rather, the blatantly stupid use thereof. After the bean-counters replaced in-house proofreaders with freelancers, another lot of bean-counters came along and replaced the freelancers with spellcheckers. That’s when the shot hit the fab.
Seriously? Professional publishing houses were using spellcheck instead of proofreaders? Which ones? I find that really hard to believe. Not saying you’re a liar, just that I can’t believe they sunk that low, because they weren’t paying freelancers all that much to begin with.
I can’t tell you which publishers offhand, but I can certainly tell you the principal sign: a book rife with homonym errors. Peddle/pedal, breaks/brakes, and the others listed in the original post: when those occur uniformly throughout the book, it was almost certainly a machine, not a human being, that was responsible. (And a human being further up the chain of command who was irresponsible.)
I’ve noticed a lot more errors in traditionally published books when it’s a older backlist title published as an ebook.
I think in that case, it’s a ebook conversion error. But if they’d just PROOF the epub/mobi/kindle file it wouldn’t be so much of a problem. I’m starting to feel that they just don’t care…
Of course they don’t care. If they cared, they might put out readable ebooks, and then people might read them, instead of buying the print edition. A fair least hypothesis is that traditional publishers are not interested in ebooks and don’t understand them; a tenable alternative, to say the least, is that they are actively hostile to ebooks because they cannot control the distribution network the way they control print. Self-publishing terrifies these people and threatens their business, and so they long to bring back the days when self-publishing meant spending thousands of dollars printing a basement full of books that no store would buy.
My favourite all-human typos, from a letter-writing course I went on when I was a civil servant… someone addressed a letter to a Mrs Whitehouse, and the typist’s finger slipped from W onto S. There was also a letter to the widow of a deceased customer, asking her to send us her late husband’s bonds, where the typist substituted an E for the D in “bonds”.
Then there was the IT guy at an office I used to work in, who trusted the spellchecker a little too much, and who, when a particular computer system went down, sent out an email apologising for the incontinence…
Years ago, I knew an IT guy who sent a woman an email saying she had left her floppy dick in the computer lab. She denied it, of course.
Oh, yeah, it got really bad for a while, right after spellcheckers were introduced. At one point, I actually edited a library book with my pen, because it was literally unreadable until I corrected the punctuation.
Then it got better. Now it’s gotten worse again. So apparently proofing is regarded as a “frill” that you cut when times get bad.
This is the most hilarious typo ever, no contest: http://bit.ly/NGVwJa
OMG! OK, yes, that probably wins! And good for her for coming right out telling folks! How mortifying!
OMG! That’s got my vote.
I’m beginning to think that all the proofreading is being done by Officer Crabtree from Allo Allo, the English spy who thinks he can speak French:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozahjxwEmjg
‘Good moaning! Michelle of the Resistance washes to tick to you.’
I had a friend who collected typos and mangled sentences from published books. Homonym goofs and dangling modifiers were her favorites. She had binders full of them.
I agree with Maureen. The problems do seem to run in cycles, with occasional bouts where publishers seem to say, “Proofreaders? We don’t need no stinkin’ proofreaders.”
“Proofreaders? We don’t need no stinkin’ proofreaders.”
Jaye,
I do wonder at times whether the readers actually care much?
I edit/proof-read for a few FFN writers, (in the hope that they’ll do the same for me.) Mostly, they don’t give a cuss, and get irritated when you point stuff out.
Judging by the reactions of the readers and reviewers, their ability to put a sentence together does not bring hope.
Perhaps semiotics has brought us to this point.
brendan
I think the readers care, but have different standards for different reading material. I want my books and magazines to look professional. I’m used to a certain high standard, plus they cost me money. But I have lower standards for fan fiction and blogs, because they’re not professional. Just like we’re more forgiving of an amateur production of a play than a big Broadway show.
What irritates me is when someone puts out a book, charges money for it, but doesn’t seem to have put any more care into it than they would a comment on YouTube. I followed a comment from this blog (another post) to an author’s website, read the free sample of his first book, and was appalled by the typos. I’m not even talking about things like brake for break, but non-words that a quick spell check would have caught. Dozens of them. My thinking is, if you can’t raise your game to a minimum level of professionalism, withdraw the book from Amazon and put it back on your LiveJournal page, because you’re not only wasting the time of your potential readers, but making indie writers who work hard look bad.
I’d want to know about typos, Brendan. A reader spotted a couple typos on my second published novel. I was mortified and sent her a corrected copy. She’s now my primary proofreader.
I once wrote that the world would be better off without certain people and so they were “expandable.” A beta reader caught it after my editor and I missed it.
A man hired me to replace him because he took another job. He was a “little person.” Another guy that interviewed him for the job wrote a thank you letter in which he said, “I look forward to hearing from you shorty.”
As for books, this had been driving me nuts for some time. As an indie/self pubber, I am hyper aware of the editing that goes into my books. So is my editor, The Comma Queen. Whenever we find a mistake already in print, there is much cursing and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes, though, our reviews specifically mention how well the books were edited.
It seems people are still surprised to find good editing in indie/self pubbed books. That is partly our fault as a community, but is very much a stereotype. (Of course, sometimes reviewers mention something missed here or there and I need to talk The Comma Queen down from a ledge, but that just means she cares lol)
But, the thing that REALLY burns me up is that books published by the Big Six get a pass on editing errors. I could name some very popular recent books that show a serious lack of editing at the copy and line levels.
Big Six books are not necessarily edited better than some indie/self pubbed books. Period.
I guess I cannot control perception and, it seems, I cannot even control all of the typos in my own books. I just wish the playing field was level and all books were judged on their individual merits.
You all do know that typos secretly breed in the dark corners of pages, right?
Splitter
“A man hired me to replace him because he took another job. He was a “little person.” Another guy that interviewed him for the job wrote a thank you letter in which he said, “I look forward to hearing from you shorty.”
OMG! I know I shouldn’t, but I about died laughing at that. I’m still giggling as I type this.
I just finished reading a Dean Koontz novel that is 20 years old, so it must have been OCR to make the ebook. There were mistakes on just about every page. Sometimes, a letter would be a half-line above all the other letters in the line. It was a good book and I don’t blame Koontz, but it would have been nice if someone at the publishing house had skimmed the book before publishing that version.
In my own work petty officer got turned several time into pretty officer.
The worst error I’m come across was in a ‘professionally’ produced e-book where an entire paragraph was put in twice one after another. It’s put me off paying anything resembling top dollar for that writer’s work until he changed publisher.
“Proofing is very hard–it’s like playing whack-a-mole.”
Josh,
So, it’s not like dealing with the nerd/geeks who produce software upgrades?
I found that if you shoot, and keep shooting them till they get it right, they stop lazing around drinking Jolt cola, eating Pizza and watching porn instead of getting the coding right.
brendan
Bremdan, the best solution for software folks is to occassionally stick them in a room with the frustrated end users. Nobody does tongue lashings quite so well as the woman in accounting who’s had to do the payroll by hand for the last month because the developers are too wrapped up in World of Warcraft with one another.
We’re having fun here in Ireland this week because one of the banks fluffed a software patch and system has fallen over locking customers out of their accounts.
Several years ago a local civic group organized a barbecue and put up posters all over town, inviting residents to attend the festivities.
“Come and join in the family fun,” declared the Loins Club of Old Northbrook.
I kept doing this when for a short time I had a day job in construction rather than my usual gig in health care. When we typed construction specs, I kept writing about the lavatory bowel instead of the bowl.