to wonder how there can be spelling or grammar errors in books?

[dipdapispants]

I don't know anything about publishing a book but I presume books are proof read before being published. I read 2 or 3 fiction books a month. I have seen spelling and grammar mistakes a number of times and can't understand how nobody seems to have noticed before publishing. Sometimes a name can change! One book I read, Edward became Joe for a couple of sentences then returned to being Edward! One author seems to think affair has an e kn the end to make affaire, this is in at least 3 of her books!

Aibu?

Forget disinterested/ uninterested: "discrete" in place of "discreet" gives me The Rage!

today I notice on my e bay account page the link at the bottom left says annoucements

also I read a book from amazon that constantly said Loose insteadof lose drove me mad.

Me too, Renter.

That'll be a self-published book, StepAway.

Oh, loose/ lose drives me mad! And "should of" !

Give me any amount of "wanna," "gonna," shoulda"... that's dialect (even idiolect!)!

Gosh, the whole publishing process is so full of gaps where errors can creep in that I sometimes think it's amazing there aren't more errors in most books. But it is hard to understand if you've never worked in the system, I admit, as it seems like a simple thing to get right!

Proofreaders can point out all manner of stuff, but at the end of the day, it's not up to them whether something finally gets corrected or not. Perhaps the editor doesn't care, perhaps the author doesn't understand (or care), perhaps the correction got missed, or worse, misread, perhaps there were so many corrections to make (due to a poor author, editor, collaborative publishing process, crazy schedule) that some of them slipped through the net because whoever is the last line of defence has gone word-blind from checking each page again and again. Perhaps the publisher won't pay for the attention to detail needed at each stage, perhaps the typesetter is incompetent!

Self-published and ebooks usually the worst - ebooks produced simultaneously with the print version should be OK, but ones converted from a backlist title a good few years old might well have all those transposition errors of 'I' for 'L' etc. as the way the files need to be treated is different and less efficient.

Oh I fucking hate the whole culture of 'voluntary' beta readers and reviewers. A good 70% of them are barely fucking literate themselves, they're just friends of the equally dim and inarticulate self-published authors.

And, as with the whole of the creative/artistic industries, stupid amateurs are a killing the whole thing off because large corporations will not pay reasonable rates for things they can get a stupid amateur to do for nothing or next to nothing.

NoSquirrels sums it up well.

Imperial publishers have no choice most of the time but to creep around their authors' foibles. If they did as you suggest they would lose a lot of money - 2/3 of the advance, the money already spent on copy editing and typesetting, cover design etc. You can't just pull a book like that.

In my naive way I suppose I thought that authors would want to be wordsmiths and get this sort of thing right. I am talking about Kindle books in particular. There are some that I simply cannot bear to read any further - even though I might like the story - because the errors just give me a pain.

Stupid amateurs? Nice - thanks for that.

In my naive way I suppose I thought that authors would want to be wordsmiths and get this sort of thing right.

Unfortunately, they have egos. Often directly disproportionate to their talent, I'm afraid. Quite a lot of editorial work is not so much about being shit-hot at grammar and spelling, and quite an awful lot about being shit-hot at managing raging egos.

I'm not slagging off self-publishing as I've done reasonably well out of it, but there are some really funny books on there. I've seen spelling mistakes on the title. I've seen the author's name spelled wrongly (mismatch with the name on the inside. I've seen a main character's name change within the first paragraph and spelling mistakes in the first sentence.

My point was, though, that if an agent is reading your book, surely they'd notice those errors. If someone said to me, "Actually, IB, you've misused this word here" I'd be mortified and certainly wouldn't insist it changed. Same with an editor - if it got past an agent, it shouldn't get past an editor.

Um, I can see where SGB is coming from - if authors ask people to beta read their book for free, how do they guarantee the quality of the service they're not paying for?! Anyone could volunteer to beta read a book. Wouldn't necessarily make it better...

RiverTam - I think most publishers tie their authors in to contracts that ask them to agree to reasonable changes to their MS. I don't see published authors getting away with poor grammar and punctuation decisions - that's more self publishers, and they can do as they like, really ... It's just hurting them.

Miaow roar - that's why amazon's 'look inside' feature is so great! Weed out the crap writers...

NoSquirrels - yep, this can be the case. I've had to hone my tact and diplomacy, Certainly, when working with self pubs.

I think most publishers tie their authors in to contracts that ask them to agree to reasonable changes to their MS. I don't see published authors getting away with poor grammar and punctuation decisions - that's more self publishers, and they can do as they like, really ... It's just hurting them.

Oh, you would be surprised. No one will get away with criminal spelling mistakes, of course, but subtler grammar issues or word choices that the author will defend to the death or just plain bad writing - people lose the enthusiasm to deal with it and no one is looking at the contract at that stage, believe me!

Just because people aren't being paid, doesn't mean they are shit at it though. I have to have decent spelling and grammar skills to do my job - those skills don't magically disappear the moment I finish for the day, I am capable of beta reading a novel without totally fucking it up!

Not being properly proof read. Most editors and journalists can't spell and too many people trust spellcheck, it's not foolproof and it's 'American' English.

Oh god.

Because some authors are so bloody precious about their Original Words of Truth that you can point out misspellings, ambiguities and bad grammar until you're blue in the face, and they will STILL say 'Please leave it as in my original.'

Or because it was so close to utter incomprehensibility that to wrestle any meaning out of it at all left you working twice the agreed time on it for no extra money.

Then you come across an Amazon review of it months later and weep to find that someone has snarkily said it 'could have done with better editing'.

Quietbat - the errors will have been the editor's first of all! The copy-editor is paid to fact check - that is not the proofreader's job!

Happ feet - your reply didn't make sense to me.

What do you mean, 'not been properly proofread'? What hasn't? Also, what did you mean that most editors can't spell? Of course they can! It's a primary requirement for a copy editor.

And Word's spellcheck can be set to any language under the sun, including various versions of English - uk, us, Australian, Caribbean etc. No editor or proofreader uses spellcheck as more than a final test after they have proofed.

Cocktail Queen - I do look inside the books on Amazon, but often the first few pages - or at least the ones I look at - are OK. Of course if it is riddled with errors from the beginning, I know to steer clear.

I do know that there are some very good, very professional self-published authors. They are the ones who will seek out and pay a competent proofreader or editor.
And I'm also aware that there are people who will 'beta-read' their mates' books for free, who are good at copy-editing as well. TBH they piss me off just as much, because however well-intentioned you are, you are seriously damaging the industry by contributing to a culture that says competence and creative skills are worthless, that there is always someone who will do the job for no money, and actually it doesn't matter that much if a shit job is done as long as it's free. So you get a vicous circle of more and more inexpensive muppets producing shitty work and fewer and fewer people who can be bothered to wade through the shit to find the good stuff, and the muppets keep on driving down the price so all the people with genuine skill and talent find they can't even make the price of a round of drinks any more, and fade out of the whole business.
Add to that the smug motivational bullshit about 'doing what you love' and 'freeing your creativity' with its implications that its grubby to want paying for your work if it's anything to do with the arts, and the only people who actually have the time and mental space to produce books, music, paintings etc are the ones with family money behind them - but often not that much to say.

My sister works in publishing and I have had this conversation with her - at established / big publishing houses, books go through several, rigorous checks. The editors and copy editors are language experts (most with top degrees in English language) but she says somehow stuff always gets missed. It's human error rather than lack of effort.

It's time, plus number of errors there in the first place.

Nobody ever reads a passage and thinks, 'Gosh. I bet someone worked hard to get all the other typos out of that.'

I forgot I had asked this, certain wasn't expecting so many replies!

I find children's books particularly bad for spelling errors. My son's new Claude book (not self-published, reasonably well-known series) had a sentence along these lines: "Try to persude them down with a banana". How does that not get picked up? Even spellcheck picks that up.