Mistakes in recently published fiction books

[Danascully2]

Has anyone else noticed poor proofreading in published books recently? I'm not talking about the finer details of colon vs semi colon etc but words in the wrong order, or in one case the same sentence twice in a paragraph (I'm confident it was an error rather than some sort of artistic choice). My 8 year old could have spotted them. I understand it's tricky to proofread a whole book but I presume it is somebody's job to do just that (editor?).
Or have mistakes always slipped through occasionally and it's just chance that I've had quite a few recently?

I read a book recently that was packed with continuity errors. At one point the male protagonist rocked up to his house and took off his muddy boots before entering. He then proceeded to take them off again to have a swim in his pool …

This is the reason. They use AI to proofread and AI is thicker than pigshit, so they get what they don't pay for.

Don’t authors proofread their own books any more? That is, after the editing that used to be done by someone else.

Having been published by a major publisher, I used to go through the proofs line by line - with a ruler underneath. Otherwise it was far too easy to miss things in your own writing.

But I still once found Bryon instead of Byron, in the finished article. 🙁

I remember reading Jacqueline Wilson as a child and one of the characters names kept changing from sentence to sentence a couple of times.

My guess would be the Chalet School series by Elinor M Brent-Dyer. She's notorious for continuity mistakes, affectionately known as EBDisms.

Yes, I’m sure that’s what the series is. Biddy O’Ryan becomes Biddy O’Hara for part of one book, inexplicably, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Major characters’ ages jump about so that girls who start off the same age as one another become several years younger or older by the time they leave school. One former teacher has two different married names (or is a bigamist). The spelling of the school’s second Head’s name changes several times, and her first name switches from Therese to Elise.

But it’s all part of the insanity that is the Chalet School. In which you can be kidnapped by an evil gang who intend to get you addicted to drugs as revenge on your detective father, but when they drug you, it’s still with the drug in ‘rich, creamy milk’, the evil, hard-faced kidnapping woman knits while escorting you to your doom, and once they realise they’ve got the wrong girl and abandon you on a long-distance train, the gang still makes sure to tuck your ticket into your hatband, so you’re not fined.😀

Could be a holm oak I suppose but not sure if they grow in Scotland. They are common enough here in SE England.

I just read a 2010 book published by a well known publisher beginning with "E", so not recent, but my son and I actually enjoyed spotting the many errors. I'd not come across this before in printed material.

I published a non-fiction book in September with one of the biggest publishing houses in the world and had not only a superb copyeditor who read and reread and reread again my book, but also a superb proofreader, plus an amazing production editor. I had five versions of the proof after it was typeset and changes were made at every stage – as far as I know, the only error that has been spotted since it was published is my fault and no one else could have known, and it will be corrected in the paperback. It’s a long book and we all went through it again and again – endlessly. It might be different in fiction and in smaller publishers too, I don’t know, but my recent experience is one of enormous attention to detail and incredibly hard-working people working towards the same goal.

Not checking that there isn’t a sleeper train from London to Yorkshire is sloppy on the part of the writer – not to mention pretty obvious if you’ve ever got a train to/from London in this country.

On those lines I was a bit frustrated recently about a book which overall I enjoyed but which had a long section based around someone getting a sleeper train from King's Cross to Yorkshire. I might be wrong but as quite a regular train user I am fairly sure there are no sleeper trains to Yorkshire (apart from anything else it only takes a train about 2 hours from kings cross to York....).

I don't mind stuff like this so much, I just see it as artistic license. Google tells me there were London to Yorkshire sleepers until the late 80s, so I'd just assume that in the fictional reality this book takes place in, they'd never stopped running.

Unless it's something so out there that it completely breaks the immersion, and there's a point to it in the story, I actually quite like it!

What does irk me in fiction is when authors include something as a substantial part of the story that they clearly haven't researched properly/at all.

I was reading a short story about someone who'd gone traveling in Thailand and ended up staying to take up Thai boxing after they were attacked. The whole focus of the story was them training and eventually competing, but the writer clearly hadn't so much as read a Wikipedia page on the sport.

@brushingboots I think a lot of these completely egregious errors are common when you have authors who write about places they are not from. American-written novels set in the UK are typically full of anachronisms and cultural and geographic errors, and I suspect British authors setting their novels abroad also make exactly the same kind of errors, however we generally won’t notice unless we are very familiar with the foreign setting.

It even happens in fantasy where authors will build an entire worldscape rooted in Medieval Europe and then have their characters breakfast on blueberry pancakes.

Gosh I'm really surprised I didn't notice that*. As I say if books probably the biggest name in fiction can get to being published without anyone picking up such floor what hope do smaller publishers have?

*I wonder if I mentally assumed it was a Scotland bound sleeper and she was getting off in Yorkshire before the overnight bit.

Sorry for the derail (!) but now I'm intrigued about what on earth the sleeper trains did all night between London and Yorkshire.... The current sleepers to NE Scotland spend a while in a siding somewhere in the middle of the night so they don't arrive too early and that's much further away... Excuse me while I head off to Google...

"Leafs" is perfectly correct in Scotland. Also roofs, hoofs, dwarfs etc.

One error that stuck with me from an otherwise enjoyable historical novel set in Scotland was that the hero lived in a Castle on the "Perthshire Coast" there was even a secret tunnel down to the sea. That must have been some tunnel.

@Colinfromaccounts there is a Waitrose in Crowborough which is about a 10/15 minute drive south of Tunbridge Wells. <almost misses point of thread>

I really have to agree. Poor editing in books is definitely on the increase but hardly a day goes by without me seeing copious glaring errors on news sites. It is as if they cannot be bothered.

Neither the author nor the setting of the book were Scottish.

@Danascully2 yes, I’ve noticed more typos in books, repeated words and the like; similar in on-line news articles and web-sites such as the BBC.

No, they were American. They obviously had something like Dunnottar Castle in mind but why not just set it in a county that has a coast, rather than landlocked Perthshire.

I get so frustrated when anachronisms pull me out of the story. Wartime books can be awful culprits - sheltering from the Blitz on a Jubilee line station, pausing a conversation when the church bells rang (in 1942!), and spotting bananas in a greengrocers window, commenting that they hadn't been seen for ages, and walking straight in to buy two - no queue, and where did they come from? Not to mention soldiers coming home within days of the war ending.

I had to stop reading Jenny Colgan books because there were huge errors in the story line and descriptions in her isle of Mure series.

One set of characters i think did have children then didn't.
One character changed hair colour, which seemed to be a basic error but one that was also quite important to the overall description (they hadn't had dyed hair)

But the worst of all was where the island was located. At one point people were popping over to Glasgow via ferry. Bit other points it was a short hop to nordic countries. Or it was way out in the north West sea.

Infuriating.

I was very pleased that the new Robert Galbraith only had a couple that stood out to me. “Weak leak” instead of “weak link” being the more egregious. I went off Adele Parks over the last decade and part of that was the sheer volume of proof reading errors in her books. It was so annoying that I gave up on books. The wrong use of words seems quite common in lots of books now too.

Editor of kid's books at one of the big four here. We do send our books out to a human to be proofread. They might not catch everything though (although I would hope they would catch repeated words and lines!).

Leaves on a deciduous tree in deepest winter (and things of that ilk) should definitely have been caught by an editor. It's beyond the scope of a proofreader to point these sorts of things out, but a good one might.

Re: the Waitrose in Tunbridge Wells or the night train to Yorkshire - this is just artistic license rather than an error. In a work of fiction, I wouldn't be getting caught up on whether a shop actually existed somewhere or a train service ran. They're just being used to set up a scene or sense of place.

When you are writing you research what you think you don't know, you don't research what you think you do know that would be a waste of time. So if you believe that a particular town has certain supermarket it doesn't occur to you to check it.
Loads of authors have people giving money to bail someone when they have been arrested in UK set books but that's not how the system works here. You can't just rock up to a police station hand over a wodge of cash and leave with the accused. But because they see it in film/TV /other books it gets perpetuated as how someone is bailed.

I was reading one the other day that mentioned the police attending the scene of a particularly 'grizzly' murder.

I was reading a book in a series of police detective novels by a well known author and scriptwriter…

He clearly thinks that a UK court is exactly like you see on television when set in the US because he wrote that:

• the judge in a courtroom scene was banging his gavel- UK judges don’t have, and never have had gavels and
• one of the barristers jumped up shouting “objection”, a real cringe. That doesn’t happen in the uk

Also a female PC had a pepper spray in her handbag for personal use, which is illegal

That was so disappointing because many authors take great pains to get their facts right