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?

Read the first line of the white text

One of the reasons that there are errors in books is the shocking rate some publishers pay. I heard from an editor colleague the other day that a publisher had offered them £650 to edit a book of 350k words (not sure what kind of book, but that is massive. The average book is about 90k words).

That’s about 122 hours of work. For £650. So the hourly rate would be well below the NMW. She turned down the book, but I’m sure that someone new and desperate will take it on.

@SlightTickle

But it’s not as though it’s Kevin Costner riding from Dover to Sherwood Forest via Hadrian’s Wall, or a major plotline involving someone running a successful mole catching business in Ireland.

Are there no moles in Ireland? I didn't know that. Did the snakes eat them all and that's why St Patrick drove them out

Proofreaders are all freelance, even for the Big 5. I haven’t heard of an in-house proofreader for years.

Yes, small publishers do employ proofreaders but their rates are often insulting.

Covers are often only proofread by in-house staff, not be a proofreader.

Also, it’s hard to see missing/extra letters that are long and thin - j, l, t, etc.

Literally every small publisher in the world uses proofreaders.

What about Ireland AM? That’s quite popular.
There’s a vineyard in Kinsale…could that have been the one he was talking about?

Must read the book!😁

I read a thriller in which the main character was in Trafalgar Square on Christmas Day surrounded by red buses. London buses don't run on Christmas Day.

Then there was a ridiculous historical novel in which a woman got on a boat in "London harbour" and ended up in Paris - technically possible, but it's not the way boats typically cross the Channel, and it took her no time at all. And she kept moving house but always had the same neighbours.

But law-related mistakes annoy me the most, because I used to be a lawyer. "Courthouse" in UK (or at least English) books is just wrong - no-one really says "I've just arrived at the courthouse". They might say "I've arrived at court" or "I'm standing outside the Crown Court" or "the court building" or just "the court" but not "courthouse". And in one very popular book, the characters were trying to challenge a wrongful conviction, and they found a barrister to take the case pro bono, which was fine, but she said she'd need to review the transcripts of the trial and they just appeared like magic. In real life, transcripts cost a fortune, and no young barrister acting pro bono would pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for the transcripts as well as reviewing them and drafting appeal documents.

And that, needless to say, would be the point at which I'd hurl the cursed paperback in the bin.

I loved Jennings and Derbyshire. I still use the term “supersonic earsight” in the hope that another fan will recognise it.

Me too.

I love them too.

In the same chapter, there was the bit about ‘uninformed policemen’ & Darbishire wanted to know what they hadn’t been informed about, not realising it was a typo for uniformed.

I spotted 3 grammatical or spelling errors and I missed the one you found in the latest Strike. I flagged them all on my kindle so I might revisit the book to see if any have been corrected.

I try hard not to notice tbh as I want to enjoy the book but that one sprung out at me (hardback not kindle so yours may have been corrected).
Just remembered an even more egregious error in an American crime novel I read on holiday this year. Evil and intricate murderous plotting by a teen who resented having been born with foetal alcohol syndrome. So he resolved to punish his parents for partying too hard. I wondered if I had completely misunderstood the condition but concluded it was the author’s absolute lack of research and not my lack of knowledge.

This is neither fiction nor a book, but I think it's relevant to this thread anyway. Fairly typical error in a Times online article. There's something like this most days. Sloppy.

I quite often notice that books set in the UK in the 50s, 60s & 70s & even the 40s, have people, for example working class families, ubiquitously drinking wine with their dinner. I don’t think my family was different to many others. I remember Blue Nun and Mateus Rosé being a very special, rare treat from the late 70s onwards.

Was that JK Rowling in a Strike book? That really pissed me off. Huge part of the plot hinging on how she would possibly make a sleeper train to Yorkshire as if it was all the way to Aberdeen. And also "ooooohhh, noooooo, how will I find transport" - when she's sitting in a hire car. And in a later book, Strike taking the sleeper to Edinburgh at what must have been an immensely inflated price compared to flying yet whinging about being poor.

I call this billionaire writing though. It's not her fault she's so out of touch that she creates plot points around entirely the wrong things money-wise.

Yes if it had been mentioned in passing it wouldn't have mattered but as you say there was a whole section revolving around the sleeper train. It was also left unexplained what Strike had done with the hire car (Though there was a mention that it was expensive...).

No spoilers about the rest of the Strike books please as I've only read the first two and am at the mercy of the reservation system at the library for when I might get the next one.

Haha, I will keep it limited to the bloody Edinburgh sleeper! I stopped reading because they stopped editing the books, ironically - they can hardly justify a lack of editing on a guaranteed best seller.

But I think it's Rowling going, "fuck you, no one edits JKR". Fair play if it's what she wants, but it made the latter books increasingly turgid and unreadable IMO.

Oh, and I figured the hire car got towed and he had to pay the fines? It just really annoyed me that she kept banging on about them being soooooo resourceful and Robin is such a good driver, but it doesn't occur to either of them to use the vehicle they're literally already in to drive to Yorkshire. Which wouldn't probably have cost more than ditching the car in the middle of London for a sleeper train that doesn't exist (I checked!).

I didn't know you could flag things up on a Kindle, that's a great feature.
It's rare that I read a book that doesn't have an error in but it's usually just one word. I do sometimes wonder if they get corrected between editions. It's easy now to send an email instead of sending a letter to the publisher/author so maybe they do more than they used to. I know books are long, but there's a lot of automatic grammar/sense software available

I read a non-fiction book on Africa which had the Nile flowing into Lake Victoria in the very first line.

I agree, For most ordinary people, drinking at home was something they simply didn't do all year round. The housekeeping money didn't stretch to luxuries like that. They'd buy a bottle or two at Christmas and that was it. My late dad sometimes got a bottle of scotch from work, and he'd make it last all year.

I quite often notice that books set in the UK in the 50s, 60s & 70s & even the 40s, have people, for example working class families, ubiquitously drinking wine with their dinner.

And characters being informal in a way that just wouldn't have happened. Even in my first job in the 1970s, the manager addressed all the women as Mrs or Miss Surname.

@HonoriaBulstrode

And characters being informal in a way that just wouldn't have happened. Even in my first job in the 1970s, the manager addressed all the women as Mrs or Miss Surname.

My DGM referred to her friends as Mrs X and Miss Y til the day she died (in the mid 1990s).