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 started reading a series of crime books but gave up by the third one due to the many spelling and grammatical errors. This author seems to churn out several books a year which are apparently bestsellers so I presume the majority of the reading public either aren't aware of the mistakes or don't care.

The author is obviously making a fortune anyway.

Is it, though? I have recently found that I’m not only old-fashioned but now, apparently, actually wrong in writing dwarves and rooves rather than dwarfs and roofs. I was so bad at this kind of stuff at school and I was always getting into trouble: it was banged and banged into me. It’s almost traumatic to have to change.

Plus people two generations under me complain on social media that us older people always type put two spaces after a full stop. This is what I was trained to do and it’s now automatic: my thumb just does it. I thought it was us older people who are intolerant and inflexible, but apparently this annoys the younger ones to distraction.

Had someone killed a bear? 🐻

That's what I was worried about 😢😢😢. Thankfully it was just a bad person, phew.

Yes it's appalling.

Recent errors noted: character whose name changes mid para
Woman who is wearing a skirt, walks into the house and is in jeans

I read a book which referenced a motorway within 20 mins of Whitby. Nope.

Books are no longer edited properly, sad to say.

Thank you very much to everyone who has shared insights of working in publishing or publishing as an author, very interesting. I do empathise with the pressures described, please still keep publishing books!

It sounds like there is a bit of a judgement in some areas around what is artistic licence in a fictional story and what is an error/impossibility which will distract readers from that story. And depending on whether it is eg fantasy/sci Fi or set in a specific real place at a specific time would make a difference I imagine as to how much fact checking is needed.
I also dislike fiction books where the author seems more interested in showing off their research (into a work environment/location/ historical period) than actually telling the story so perhaps there is a happy medium of level of research!

My books have developmental, copy-edits and then a proof-read at the end. Sometimes a sanity read by a fresh pair of eyes, too.

I have noticed less general knowledge at the copy-edits stage, not just with my books but with other authors' books. Silly things, like using the US/Irish spelling of whiskey when someone is drinking whisky in Scotland, for instance. Or trouble with distances--you can't get from London to Plymouth overnight by foot. The sea between Dover and Calais is not the North Sea.

I think some of it is down to copy-edits being done out of house, by people who don't always live in the UK. Or perhaps decisions are made to use US English because of the number of Americans who complain about spelling mistakes like 'licence', 'realise' and punctuation being done in the slightly different British-English way. 'Kerb' is not a spelling mistake.

I've noticed more and more factual mistakes in fiction books. Obviously it's fiction, but it should be within a framework of fact - especially regarding geographical locations and so on. I have stopped reading historical fiction, especially 2nd World War stories about resistance because there are so many mistakes and inaccuracies in them. There are enough true stories about this kind of thing that I've come to consider the fiction on the topic to be absolutely pointless.
I've also started a couple of books recently where there were continuity errors in the first few chapters and I've given up on them.
I can forgive small typos, spelling errors and so on, but not the larger errors which ruin the story.

I do think that some of what some posters are viewing as errors is just artistic licence. Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders has a Cork vineyard in the wrong location, but I don’t think that’s an error, any more than the Whitby motorway or the Tunbridge Wells Waitrose are, or the fact that there’s no popular Irish breakfast tv show — it’s just invented to suit the story.

If that's the case I can't be doing with "artistic licence" - to me it's inaccuracies.

I like everything to be correct 🙂

I don't think rooves has ever been correct. My 80-year-old dad was an architect and has always banged on about this.

But unless you happen to know the specific area, you won’t know it’s inaccurate (I mean, assuming you’re not googling Waitrose locations to check them against books or something) and surely, it doesn’t much matter?

See I think it does matter.

I would check the TW Waitrose if I were writing that book (after all as others have said, that is incredibly simple to do).

The motorway near Whitby is really stupid – there was no need for it to be a motorway, any big road would have done. Also the character falls asleep parked up in a layby on said motorway – no laybys on motorways tho. Just a really silly sloppy piece of writing.

Set the book on a coastal town in the NE of England if you want, but if you say it is near Whitby then you need to make sure that’s reasonable.

I do this copyediting checking for some of my living (fact not fiction tho tbf) so it really annoys me when people get things wrong.

If you don't know the said location yes true – I do happen to know Whitby pretty well tho (as do many many others) and so it grated on me.

I should say tho that I enjoyed the author's note in Babel basically pointing out that it was a work of fiction and yes, she did spend a lot of time in Oxford and know it well, but yes, there might be anachronisms in the book so just deal with it. That's fine.

Similarly in Sayers' Gaudy Night where she puts up Harriet Vane's fictional college on the Balliol cricket pitch – but also mentions lots of genuine colleges. She puts an author's note at the start to explain.

I kind of agree - if you want to have the poetic licence to alter a town to suit your requirements make it a fictional town (even though in your head you know you mean Tunbridge Wells or Whitby or whatever) but if you use T Wells or Whitby as a named town make sure you are describing the town you have named.

Well, I look things up, too but other writers make different decisions, and I’m not concerned about them. I set a scene in a hotel in a city I know well. I only discovered recently that it’s now been converted into temporary accommodation for Ukrainians, so my characters wouldn’t be able to book a room. But I’m not planning to alter it. I don’t think it’s important.

Fascinated by Waitrose TW discussion as used to live there decades ago. Thére is one at the petrol station in St John's and a proper one in Tonbridge. Used to be the poor cousin to TW so obvs coming up in the world.

I was taught 'rooves' in the 1950s in an English primary school.

I can't see why 'roofs' and 'rooves' aren't both acceptable.

@Danascully2 I think that fantasy/sci-fi authors are on the whole absolutely meticulous about continuity and world building - their fanbases are such that any break with established lore results in uproar.

Terry Pratchett for example was a master at building fantasy worlds based on in depth research of real world history. You would never catch one of his characters cutting corn with a scythe.

Yes I have noticed mistakes in kindle books that I report.

I know this is petty but one was a British girl living in London going for a run after putting on her ‘sneakers’. Nobody in the UK would refer to trainers this way.

I imagine it was ignored but I couldn’t let it go.

Just remembered another plot hole in a TM Logan book. Quite an important point- phone in holder in car for sat nav racing through the city. Then phone in handbag requiring rummaging and being distracted meaning dire consequences for the driver.

Proofreaders still exist. They used to be in-house at the big publishers' but now, like so many services, they are hired as freelancers when needed. And as with all freelance services, some people will do a better job than others.

I read a lot of old books and rarely find errors. But modern books, yes. I mean typos, but also factual errors like those mentioned above, because the publisher trusts the author, and the editor and/or proofreader isn't paid to check (athiugh that may've changed post- Salt Path, IDK).

In the first Thursday Club Murder book, RO has Northern Cyprus using the euro, for example ( it uses Turkish currency). In something I've just read, a passport from 1961 has a colour photo. These are on the author, really.

Also, apparently Kindle books from a small publisher can be AI-generated! So can have loads of errors. I looked at the reviews for a French title translated into English. People said to make sure you get a Kindle edition from a major publisher because the others (as above) have chunks where French idioms had been translated word for word and the English made no sense!

But that’s not an error. Some publishers will revise everything into US spellings and idioms for the US edition, and that may in some cases have been the basis for the Kindle edition, and sometimes some UK publishers will use US spellings and expressions for the sake of US sales. So Sally from Surbiton trips over the curb of the sidewalk because the laces of her sneakers come undone, falls and rips a hole in her pantyhose.

Proofreaders aren’t fact-checkers, though. That’s on the author. The copy editor and proofreaders will flag up if I’ve said ‘tshirt’, ’T-shirt’ and ‘tee shirt’, and my editor is going to be alert to continuity things like if I’ve made the sun rise twice, but if she doesn’t know that it’s not possible for someone to have boiled a kettle on a campfire in the same length of time it takes to boil an electric kettle, or thinks the Jubilee Line predates WW2, then she’s not going to flag it.