Some of our stories are better edited than the pros

[Wifetheif]

Interesting article on why editing standards today are piss-poor. Some L.com authors have higher standards than say, Random House.

https://ask.metafilter.com/228263/Why-are-book-editors-nowadays-so-bad-at-their-jobs

 

[MrPixel]

The problem is endemic. Honest-to-gosh proofreaders vanished decades ago. I supervised, oh, a couple of dozen in the course of three jobs running typesetting and page makeup operations. According to management, their function was replaced by computer-resident spell-checkers. Right.

 

[KeithD]

Review/proofing lost a couple of steps over my second career as a publishing house editor, 1997-2021. Of course, automation over that period cut down in the number of steps in which mistakes could be introduced, as well. I think there probably are fewer formal training programs for professional editing on offer now. The university graduate program in which I trained is closed.

That said, the assertion that some of the editing at Lit. is better than professional editors would do is just wild-ass sweeping bravado based on no evidence.

 

[ronde]

I have no experience with how a publishing house edits work, but I do have experience with technical literature such as lab reports and project proposals. Those began to go down hill quickly once companies layed off the secretaries and computers with word processors became standard office equipment at the same time college engineering programs stopped requiring credit in at least one writing class as part of a degree program. I was forced to take two. Judging by some of what the main stream media publishes, I expect they did the same thing to many if not most of their editorial staff.

I also think the rush to publish is responsible for much of the poor editing. It's been my experience that any article that ends with "this is a developing story" is bound to have typos, missing punctuation, and other errors a good editor would have caught. Instead of losing the time it would take to edit the piece, the reporter bangs it out on a keyboard, runs one spell check, and then submits it for publication.

I would assume the situation is much the same with most publishing houses. Their income comes from publishing as many books by known authors as possible so any delay pushes that income into the next quarter or even the next year.

I disagree with the article about an editor shortening the length of a work of fiction or some sort of documentation. Once an author has established an average length of a book, the public who buys that book expects the next to be about as long. In order to do this, authors use "filler" that doesn't really have much to do with the story. It's just there to make the work as long as the last, and a publishing company probably wouldn't change that.

As for the editing on Lit, it's no better or worse than the editing of novels or news. It may seem better in some cases because Laurel doesn't publish anything that's not at least readable, but there are still errors there in many stories, including mine. I can understand the reluctance of some writers here to use an editor, because I've experience what an editor can do. They'll correct spelling and punctuation, but in some cases, change the wording to be what they want to read rather than what I wanted to write.

 

[KeithD]

They'll correct spelling and punctuation, but in some cases, change the wording to be what they want to read rather than what I wanted to write.

Except they can't really carry through with that here on Literotica. You, the author, submit the work. You can accept or not any changes an "editor" has made to it.

 

[MrPixel]

To underscore the management mindset in play here, my wife took a job with a local newspaper, mostly producing display ads. She was previously a book designer for a regional academic press before we moved to our retirement city. In that setting, there were several levels of editorial attention, including her as she made-up the pages and checked printer blue-lines.

At the newspaper she was fired for proofreading copy and asking to verify the client submissions. Most frequent problem was the date didn't match the day of the week. Our code phrase for this problem is "Everybody knows bingo is on Tuesday."

 

[TxRad]

I work with a wonderful editor who has three proofreaders in her pocket. If she retires from where she is. So do i.

 

[ronde]

Except they can't really carry through with that here on Literotica. You, the author, submit the work. You can accept or not any changes an "editor" has made to it.

I understand that. I was talking about sending a story to an editor, the editor making changes, and then sending it back to me so I could submit it. That was my experience before.

 

[Duleigh]

I think here at [lit] the term best used would be "Peer Reviewed"

 

[Bramblethorn]

Interesting article on why editing standards today are piss-poor. Some L.com authors have higher standards than say, Random House.

https://ask.metafilter.com/228263/Why-are-book-editors-nowadays-so-bad-at-their-jobs

Bit harsh of the Metafilter poster to blame editors "taking a laissez-faire attitude" for bloat in the last Harry Potter book. That wasn't the editors' fault, it was the old problem of an author getting big enough that they don't feel they need to listen to editors any more.

I think a lot of the replies have the right of it, though: a combination of cost-cutting and difficulty finding people with the right skills.

My experience is in non-fiction technical publishing, so it may not be quite the same as in fiction land, but I suspect a lot of the same factors apply. Because editing involves work that can be transmitted electronically and done anywhere in the world, there's a lot of pressure to shift that work to somewhere like India or the Philippines where people will do that work cheaply.

On the face of it, this seems like it should be simple. My work requires specialist skills, but there are a billion people in India, and plenty of them have English as good as mine and subject-matter skills to match. I would estimate there are hundreds of people in India who could do my job as well as me, for much cheaper.

But for whatever reason, they don't seem to find those people. Offshoring turns out to be complicated, and it seems to be really hard to get the cost saving without the quality drop - there have been volumes written about the problem. Fortunately, my area is one where some aspects of quality aren't optional, so the work keeps coming back on-shore. In other areas of publishing, I expect publishers may be more willing to accept the trade-off.

 

[Duleigh]

But for whatever reason, they don't seem to find those people. Offshoring turns out to be complicated, and it seems to be really hard to get the cost saving without the quality drop

This was something I railed against my employers at Comcast about. Just because someone speaks English, doesn't mean they speak American, or Australian, or Brit. Context is lost when you stand 12,000 miles away. And the befuddled morons at Comcast couldn't understand, "We're saving millions of dollars, why aren't the peasants happy?" Because even though the person in India understood the language, they had no idea what the customer was talking about. So to fix it, directors,who I believe live on Mars, decided that engineers were needed to fix it. So we had to drop whatever we were doing to take on a problem that the American customer support representative that were laid off last year could have fixed within 4 minutes. In protest we began to sign off the complaints as an Offshore PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) and we never heard back on any of it.

Now imagine these people who speak English but can't understand what "Service Contract" implies gets to sit down with 95,000 words of pure American.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This was something I railed against my employers at Comcast about. Just because someone speaks English, doesn't mean they speak American, or Australian, or Brit. Context is lost when you stand 12,000 miles away. And the befuddled morons at Comcast couldn't understand, "We're saving millions of dollars, why aren't the peasants happy?" Because even though the person in India understood the language, they had no idea what the customer was talking about. So to fix it, directors,who I believe live on Mars, decided that engineers were needed to fix it. So we had to drop whatever we were doing to take on a problem that the American customer support representative that were laid off last year could have fixed within 4 minutes. In protest we began to sign off the complaints as an Offshore PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) and we never heard back on any of it.

Now imagine these people who speak English but can't understand what "Service Contract" implies gets to sit down with 95,000 words of pure American.

I get what you're saying, and that's certainly an issue with a lot of call-centre stuff, but for the work I do it's not even regional variations that are the problem. Mostly it's in a restricted, standardised subset of English without a lot of regional variation. The variations that do exist are small things like ise/ize that can be covered in a style sheet, and even if an editor misses those, it's not the end of the world - it's more important that the material is understandable and factually correct.

I think part of it is that it's much easier to assess cost than quality when you're contracting work out. Say you're a publisher looking to cut your costs by offshoring, and I'm a contractor trying to get your business. I can hire editors just as good as the ones you had at home, and still give you a 20% saving on what the work used to cost you... or I can hire shoddy editors and offer you a 30% saving, and until the job's done you won't be able to see the difference in their work. My rival is offering you a 25% saving - of course I'm going to take the cheap and shoddy option.

 

[MrPixel]

Hey, D. Check the pilot truck on this thread before the front set of drivers leave the rails. Yes, inside joke.

I think the original premise is valid, that (many) stories on LitE have much tighter editing than seen in professional publishing situations these days. It's simply a matter of investment in the product and the time required to make that investment. The old adage time = money applies here. Companies need to control costs, and paying for detailed editing and proofreading subtracts from the bottom line.

Volunteer writers with a big personal and emotional investment in the quality of their work have no costs beyond their time. A lot of us will edit a story until it squeaks. However, I will admit that not everybody here has a Manual of Style sitting on their desk, or got better than a 'C' in Comp 231.

 

[PandemicReader8]

I published my first book with a small, Midwest house, they paid two editors. There was a typo on page three and two more in the first chapter.

For reasons, I left that experience and went Indie. I paid a highly recommended professional editor over $1,000 from my own pocket. She missed "Chpter Four"...

I then introduced the concept of liquidated damages (from my day job running projects) to all my contracts. I've had some pros say no, but b the ones that say yes, do stellar work.

So, yeah.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I published my first book with a small, Midwest house, they paid two editors. There was a typo on page three and two more in the first chapter.

For reasons, I left that experience and went Indie. I paid a highly recommended professional editor over $1,000 from my own pocket. She missed "Chpter Four"...

A couple of years ago I bought a new hardcover from a reputable traditional publisher. This was something like book 8 in a series. One of the early chapters somehow picked up a chapter title from way back in book 2 of the series, which gave me brief hopes that a long-absent character might be making a return. I guess somebody used the Book 2 files as a template for setting up Book whatever-number and missed changing that chapter title - but it's not a small thing to slip through editing! Also got to see the author facepalm on social media when somebody mentioned it to him.

It's rare that I read a professionally-edited first printing without catching a handful of typos and similar mistakes, though not usually that prominent.

 

[PandemicReader8]

A couple of years ago I bought a new hardcover from a reputable traditional publisher. This was something like book 8 in a series. One of the early chapters somehow picked up a chapter title from way back in book 2 of the series, which gave me brief hopes that a long-absent character might be making a return. I guess somebody used the Book 2 files as a template for setting up Book whatever-number and missed changing that chapter title - but it's not a small thing to slip through editing! Also got to see the author facepalm on social media when somebody mentioned it to him.

It's rare that I read a professionally-edited first printing without catching a handful of typos and similar mistakes, though not usually that prominent.

90,000+ words, something is getting missed. Four sets of eyes and two pieces of software scanned my last book and "scared" still made it into the book as "sacred".

 

[MrPixel]

... One of the early chapters somehow picked up a chapter title from way back in book 2 of the series, ...

The saying around our household is, "Nobody proofreads headlines."