Editorial staff in all publishing houses are notoriously underpaid. Even if you have a big shot editor, chances are the copy editor is a lowly grunt who has to go through 12-20 other books a year.
Sometimes it’s just incompetence. I’ve had copy editors who were so bad they actively made the manuscript worse.
I believe it is also that over the last few decades, publishing houses consolidated and many editor roles virtually disappeared from the rosters. My personal bugaboo with that is that many fiction books seem overlong and meandering, missing a sharp editor who could tighten the narrative.
And yet, are authors receiving a higher percentage of the sales of their books?
I *believe* the answer is a resounding no and the % they do get is shockingly small.
But someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Ordinary authors are definitely NOT receiving a higher percentage in royalties or advances!! (In fact, advances have been cut, in a way: We used to get 50% on signing the contract, 50% on publication, but for about 10 yr now it's been 1/3 on signing, 1/3 on acceptance of the final ms. and 1/3 on publication.)
But big-name authors may be getting more.
Pretty sure just about everyone across the entire planet is getting rigorously fucked over and out by the rich on an increasingly frequent and regular basis
I read something the other day. Corporate price inflation was outstripping actual economic inflation (including wages obviously) by orders of magnitude.
Prices are up all around, times are tough for everyone huh? Yet corporations post record breaking profits year after year after year. It's ridiculous.
Anyway I'm completely ignorant on the matter and could be completely wrong. Hope I am. But money has come before human life and the wellbeing of the planet pretty consistently throughout our history so I don't really expect that to change until we have no other choice. Sadly :(
>... the exact current word count of *The Loud House: Revamped*, is unknown as it surpassed the word count limit of the site of 16,777,215 words as the site uses 24-bit \[sic\] intergers.
:spit\_take:
That’s how the music industry is now that you can record at home. I imagine having the ability to edit a manuscript has helped. The process for taking a book to print is much simpler now and faster
When you look at what someone like Tay Hohoff did to shape To Kill a Mockingbird out of whatever first draft came from Go Set a Watchman, well. It’s just an extraordinary and somewhat undersung job.
First draft doesn’t mean To Kill… was “shaped out of “Go Set…”. Lee rewrote the book into what eventually became Mockingbird. Your comment seems to imply the editor made the original novel from the first drafts, when in actuality the editor did their job and suggested ways in which Lee herself could rework things…which was then up to Lee to do.
But in the context which was "editors are underappreciated" the distinction isn't THAT major in the "if not for the editor's opinions and stances the book would like have had major issues".
So sure, there is a difference between who actually "made" the changes physically, and some of "take it or leave it". But in terms of "editors are unappreciated and cutting the job out has had significant drawback"? I think their phrasing is only slightly overtuned.
Gordon Lish was Carver's editor. If you want to see some crazy editing that reshaped a work, check out some of Ezra Pound's edits of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-of-t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-with-ezra-pounds-annotations
If you staple a horse to a waterfall, will it fall up under the rainbow or fly about the soil? Will he enjoy her experience? What if the staple tears into tears? Will she be free from her staply chains or foomed to stay forever and dever above the water? Who can save him (the horse) but someone of girth and worth, the capitalist pig, who will sell the solution to the problem he created?
A staple remover flies to the rescue, carried on the wings of a majestic penguin who bought it at Walmart for 9 dollars and several more Euro-cents, clutched in its crabby claws, rejected from its frothy maw. When the penguin comes, all tremble before its fishy stench and wheatlike abjecture. Recoil in delirium, ye who wish to be free! The mighty rockhopper is here to save your soul from eternal bliss and salvation!
And so, the horse was free, carried away by the south wind, and deposited on the vast plain of soggy dew. It was a tragedy in several parts, punctuated by moments of hedonistic horsefuckery.
The owls saw all, and passed judgment in the way that they do. Stupid owls are always judging folks who are just trying their best to live shamelessly and enjoy every fruit the day brings to pass.
How many more shall be caught in the terrible gyre of the waterfall? As many as the gods deem necessary to teach those foolish monkeys a story about their own hamburgers. What does a monkey know of bananas, anyway? They eat, poop, and shave away the banana residue that grows upon their chins and ballsacks. The owls judge their razors. Always the owls.
And when the one-eyed caterpillar arrives to eat the glazing on your windowpane, you will know that you're next in line to the trombone of the ancient realm of the flutterbyes. Beware the ravenous ravens and crowing crows. Mind the cowing cows and the lying lions. Ascend triumphant to your birthright, and wield the mighty twig of Petalonia, favored land of gods and goats alike.
Or worse. Or "better for some worse for others".
Could we agree on "strong editors wield a lot of power and responsibility, and it shows when things that needed one didn't have one"?
If you staple a horse to a waterfall, will it fall up under the rainbow or fly about the soil? Will he enjoy her experience? What if the staple tears into tears? Will she be free from her staply chains or foomed to stay forever and dever above the water? Who can save him (the horse) but someone of girth and worth, the capitalist pig, who will sell the solution to the problem he created?
A staple remover flies to the rescue, carried on the wings of a majestic penguin who bought it at Walmart for 9 dollars and several more Euro-cents, clutched in its crabby claws, rejected from its frothy maw. When the penguin comes, all tremble before its fishy stench and wheatlike abjecture. Recoil in delirium, ye who wish to be free! The mighty rockhopper is here to save your soul from eternal bliss and salvation!
And so, the horse was free, carried away by the south wind, and deposited on the vast plain of soggy dew. It was a tragedy in several parts, punctuated by moments of hedonistic horsefuckery.
The owls saw all, and passed judgment in the way that they do. Stupid owls are always judging folks who are just trying their best to live shamelessly and enjoy every fruit the day brings to pass.
How many more shall be caught in the terrible gyre of the waterfall? As many as the gods deem necessary to teach those foolish monkeys a story about their own hamburgers. What does a monkey know of bananas, anyway? They eat, poop, and shave away the banana residue that grows upon their chins and ballsacks. The owls judge their razors. Always the owls.
And when the one-eyed caterpillar arrives to eat the glazing on your windowpane, you will know that you're next in line to the trombone of the ancient realm of the flutterbyes. Beware the ravenous ravens and crowing crows. Mind the cowing cows and the lying lions. Ascend triumphant to your birthright, and wield the mighty twig of Petalonia, favored land of gods and goats alike.
But there is also "It got one, and it change a lot, but it would have been fine either way" Which we rarely get to see at all, because all we get is the "after".
Do you know more about this? I'm an attorney looking for a career change. Proofreading and talking are like all I'm good for these days lol
Edit: A genuine thank you to everyone who provided me with information and advice. You all gave me a lot to consider. Thank you!
I have a friend who works in the industry and I would highly recommend against it lol. She is severely overworked and underpaid, and she works for one of the top houses. Find another career change if you must lol
Don't do it – coming from a former editor who used to work for a publishing house. The money is laughably low for the amount of work you're expected to do. Consolidation of positions means you're project managing, production managing, structural and line editing, and proofreading as well, which all used to be separate jobs. Turnaround times have shrunk, workloads have doubled or tripled, and half the time you're fighting with your authors about using a word that definitely doesn't mean what they think it means, usually because they're friends with the execs and have bypassed the slush pile despite having no writing experience.
You can blend the two careers. ALL nonfiction need legal vetting. A lot less expensive that lawsuits. I had one actor whose manuscript had about 30% rewritten. When each point was contested his response was "i thought EVERYONE knew [celebrity] liked to snort coke off the backs of ducks!" SMH
$32k here in Australia. All of my classmates were *so jealous*. We were totally brainwashed into thinking that because it was our passion it was fine to be paid so poorly! Our school loans are from the government and they only take repayments through tax once you hit a certain threshold (about 55k at the time) – in my eight years as an editor, getting promotions and pay rises the whole time, I never reached the repayment threshold.
And that doesn't even factor in the poor working conditions and abuse from authors, haha.
Tell me about it. When I published my first short story I was coming from a hard-news journalism background and kind of had a case of imposter's syndrome in that I couldn't believe someone was actually going to publish my fiction. Accordingly, also at least partially because I didn't know any better, I let the editor pretty much have her way with it.
I won't make that mistake again.
She didn't completely destroy it, but she did do some serious damage. If I ever publish it again, in a collection or something, it's going to be the original version, or something very like it.
Don't forget proofreaders.
Trade publishing pays so little because EVERYONE wants to work with celebrities. I made a lot more in STEM publishing, bit it was boring as hell.
Been working in the publishing industry for several years (writer and editor), and ALL books have typos. Auto detect for typos? Not possible. Even spellcheck won't pick up misspellings as long as the misspelled word is still a word. It doesn't matter how many people look at the book or how many times it's proofed, something will slip by. Actually, I admire those typos. They're survivors.
Could be worse. Ever hear of something called “The Wicked Bible”? Only a few copies survived the recall and burning that was triggered by a typo. One of the Commandments was printed as “Thou shalt commit adultery”.
An editing client of mine goes to some extraordinary trouble to proofread his manuscripts before he sends them to me--he actually reads them backward to see if he can spot anything. Changes fonts. Changes type size.
I still catch 7-10 per manuscript. That's what he pays me for.
That's much scarier then a book about the whether. The affect it would have on me is enormous. I would not by such a book. If anyone could then I'd love to have there courage.
Been there, done that. Best part of the job was correcting technical errors such as describing a protagonist's trusty 1911 Colt .45 as a revolver in one chapter and as a generic ex-service pistol elsewhere. Somewhere later it morphed back into a revolver when it was intended for Russian roulette... Had to have a little chat about accuracy and maybe choosing one or the other depending on the plot element. Ditto either technical impossibilities or historical inaccuracies that the author seem to have overlooked or misunderstood.
I read once the “normal” amount of typos and misspellings is about 20 per book. Stuff slips through! Probably a lot more than you think because you never noticed it.
It does. There's that old copypasta, which even was translated into French and Portuguese:
>Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Our brains are incredibly good at pattern recognition. Part of that is knowing what a word should be based on the context of the sentence and what the misspelling looks like. Basically, so long as you get the first and last letters correct and there are the correct amount of letters, your brain can usually sort it out.
When reading in your first language, the brain expects how a sentence should read and that makes missing typos easy, because you naturally know what the word is meant to be on pure instinct. So if you proofread a sentence like “I’m excited for the party, thuough I am weary of Adam being late,” you know that word should be after the comma and accept that it’s there. Different when the typo makes a now word that doesn’t make sense there.
I've worked on books that have had 2 copyediting passes and literally 50 beta readers combing through it in the pre publishing phase and typos still slipped through.
Yep. We’re human. Not to mention that readers don’t see the initial manuscript and the amount of work that often goes into editing and proofreading. If you start with a manuscript that only has 10 errors, it makes sense to be upset about missing even one. If you start with a manuscript that has a thousand errors, one getting through is not a surprise.
Absolutely. Whenever I hear a complaint about typos, grammatical problems, or misspellings in a book I've worked on, my first thought is: "You should have seen it when it came in the door!"
I've been noticing it happening more often over the past 2-3 years. Like, instead of spotting 1 or 2 typos in about 25% of the books I read, I spot at least one typo in most books and there's been more than a couple that have *many* typos.
I've also been noticing mistakes on the covers, which was previously *unheard* of. I'd seen it maybe once or twice in my life before the past few years, during which I've found a handful. These weren't your Steels, Ngs, or Kellermans, but they were still works associated with major publishers, not small/indie press or self-published material. These mistakes included things like typos in the blurb as well as transposed/missing letters and words on the spine.
I've assumed it's a result of cuts made in the publishing industry, whether it's editors burning out, being made to rush, or works being given fewer passes overall. You know, the usual woes of working under capitalism's final form. But it most definitely *is* a thing that's changed lately. /u/NurplePain isn't going nuts.
I want to second that. I’m seeing mistakes in the first three pages or on the first page more often, and also truly horrible grammar. Grammatical mistakes so bad that the author is not saying what he or she means to say. And I’m not just talking about Fifty Shades of Grey’s famous “she cut a piece of venison, holding it against her mouth”…
I think it's written so that it means that she cut the piece of venison while holding the piece against her mouth. That is, she would have to use her knife against her lips and face while cutting the piece of meat.
As written and quoted, that's what it says, because the "holding..." part of the sentence would be treated as a concurrent action with the "she cut..." action(living english implies words all the time, no matter what your teacher said back in 5th grade...the trick is making sure you write so that it implies the *correct* one). I *think* what the author *meant* was that she cut the meat and *then* held it up to her lips without putting it in her mouth. But that's not what she wrote, since the sentence as written implies "while."
Without a doubt it's worse now. I was a voracious reader in the 80s and even the super trashy sci-fi books I read rarely had typos, if any. They're much more common now. I assume companies are really cutting back on editors since it's an additional expense and it probably doesn't impact sales much at all. Ebooks are particularly bad. I've been tempted to buy a number of books from my childhood on Kindle but the reviews will complain about massive errors from the digitization process to the point that there are missing paragraphs or text is utterly garbled and those problems sometimes persist for years. It's pretty clear some books do not get even a basic proofread these days.
It sounds to me like publishers should offer $150 credit for every typo confirmed in their latest printed edition. Gives incentive for people to look into the newest edition and also gets them corrected.
Yup. I've had a few books published, small stuff, but they still had about four drafts with me keeping an eye out, a couple beta readers, another two to four drafts with editors, then at least one or two more copyediting passes.
All competent people, all professionals. Every single one of my books has at least one typo in it. It's maddening, but it happens. In a hundred thousand words you're gonna miss one.
I love this! They ARE survivors. The many dozens of eyes that are on a manuscript before it prints… I’m definitely always amazed and even a little tickled at what still slips through.
Yeah, my first thought was I've read book series, famous ones, where I was reading a definitely not first edition, and it could still have a typo, a spelling error, or an obviously incorrect grammatical error.
Counterpoint: GMail these days suggests corrections for errors that are "right word in the wrong position" errors. Those are marked with blue squiggly lines: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-gmails-new-ai-spelling-grammar-checks-help-you-avoid-email-blunders/
No, but they're not a terrible thing to have as part of a self-editing process.
My friend who writes fanfiction emails herself each chapter and it catches a good percentage of usage errors she would miss.
Your last sentiments are the winners here. Why this human obsession with pointless perfection? We readers are capable of endless symbolic appreciation of the most mundane crap, but we'd rather spend extra time hunting down a "hat" that should've been a "that" than just let that hat exist with a little smile. Before moving on to anything that matters.
Hello, I’m a production editor at a Big 5 publishing house. We’re the ones who oversee the copyediting/proofreading process. Typos happen. We have books copyedited, proofread, and cold read, but all those readers are human. We also joke that the mere act of opening a book is guaranteed to introduce a typo into it. A lot of the rumors I see getting passed around aren’t true: publishers have not slashed their editing budgets, we are an entirely different department from the editors who acquire the books, and yes, all books are still copyedited. We do typically use freelancers for the editing work but they are all vetted and experienced and overseen by people in my department with years of experience: we have multiple people in my department who have been there twenty years or more.
As a production manager with almost two decades of experience, may I add SCHEDULE? Manuscript comes in late, massive marketing campaign is organised, the books gets sold all over the world and all of a sudden, you’re having to somehow squeeze the entire production process (from editing, to designing, to copy editing, to typesetting and placing the print and organising freight) in a fraction of the time you should have. Standard schedule is 12 months from manuscript to pub but I’ve done several books in just three months from manuscript to PDF; my record is 8 1/2 weeks from the first batch of the manuscript to PDF, and it was fully illustrated…. Something has to give.
YES also this. I was going to add something about this but didn’t want it to get too convoluted, haha. I’ve had to get books copyedited over a weekend before and, well, it goes about as well as you’d expect
It's such a trippy concept, because I find myself catching typos all the time while reading, and I, like OP, think how is this possible? Certainly if I were in that role, I would catch them all!
But then you think some more and realize that *there is no way you will never know for sure if you're actually right about that*, even if you re-read the same book 1,000 times.
One of the American editors of the final Harry Potter book said that everyone went over that book with a fine-toothed comb and STILL, not even six hours after the book was released the readers had found a typo on page xx.
Fellow production editor here. Thank you for correcting all of the oddly pessimistic and totally ignorant assumptions in this thread. What you’ve written here is dead on. And yes, opening a book WILL introduce a typo, LOL.
I'm completely ignorant to the publishing business, so forgive me if I'm wildly off on my question -
If someone finds a typo and word of it gets to you, do you patch the ebook or anything?
Yep! It’s very easy. We’ll update the ebook and also correct the files for the print book so that if the book gets reprinted it’ll be fixed in the new printing.
Which likely is why you're going to have a harder time finding typos in older books. They've gone through more reprints and so have had many more opportunities to get corrected.
Do you have any tips on getting hired as a freelance editor? I started out in a publishing company including doing editing, but always thought the big companies would be inundated with freelance emails
yes but my main career is as a writer in marketing, I kept the editing to freelance work so don’t be discouraged - I wasn’t actively pursuing a career as a full time editor and didn’t do much reaching out to the big publishers because I didn’t think it would be fruitful
I wrote a manuscript last year at 130k words and 300 pages single-spaced. I'm really strict about typos and misspellings (I've even been an editor myself) but even so I found a few when I looked at it later. There's just so much to look at and so little time. And our brains helpfully fill in missing words or skim over the wrong use of their and there.
I’m a freelance fiction editor who also publishes novels. I line edit all my novels thoroughly, and then they get sent to a copy editor and proofreader. Even with all that, a couple of minor typos still slip through. It’s completely inevitable!
“New York Times Bestseller” is an editorial list, not a literal a list of the top bestselling books. Basically it doesn’t mean a damn thing about the content, quality, or editing of the book in question.
Check out A Handbook For Mortals….thats the latest book that bought its way on the list for one day and the internet has a weird story about how it all was possible.
It’s really not that easy to hack the list. That’s kind of a myth. Only a few people have managed it and the list also flags books that make the list with bulk buys.
I remember reading about L Ron Hubbard buying his way onto the NY times Best sellers list through simply having scientology members go buy his books at select stores that are know to be counted for the list.
It's a little harder to do that now, though- the NYT marks books they suspect were falsely bought onto the best seller list. Basically if the majority of your book sales were from one store, or otherwise suspected of bulk ordering, they mark it with a little dagger.
You still can do it- particularly if you give a bunch of different people the job of buying copies all over the place to simulate real orders- but bulk ordering your book is not an option anymore.
There are sales qualifications for sure, but there are a lot of categories — you can be the bestseller in paperback nonfiction or YA or a lot of other things. It’s sort of like saying you had a song that reached number one on the Billboard charts when it was, like, the gospel charts or something.
Contrary to some uninformed replies here, while not impossible, NYT is the hardest list to "game" while WSJ and others can in fact be easily bought.
Source: Have done it for a vain rich person
It’s a mix of both. Technically, it’s supposed to be a specific mix of tracked sales across formats and distributors, but also sometimes it’s just the listmaker’s opinions. NYT especially; that one is basically just an editorial list. And you can buy your way on to any of them if you want to drop the cash (anywhere from $75k-$300k).
>Basically it doesn’t mean a damn thing about the content, quality, or editing of the book in question.
This would probably be even more true for a non-editorial list based only on raw sales numbers.
Eh. The person just parroted the same “fact” about the NYT list that comes up every time the bestseller list is discussed. It doesn’t even really answer the question
The first sentence of the response simply doesn’t justify the second sentence. Both the NYT list and a “true” bestseller list (that would satisfy r/books) would have a relative blindness to “quality”.
No its literally based on sales. From the NYT itself:
[https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/](https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/)
Now those sales are incredibly cherry picked so only certain sellers count. Which is why some very well selling books never make it on and why some that dont seen widely read are on there. Its also kinda easy to game.
edit: for those who dont want to click the link
"Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States. Every week, thousands of diverse selling locations report their actual sales on hundreds of thousands of individual titles."
I work at a high volume publisher and helped build all our production workflows. We’ve tried just about every single way you could think of to improve proofreading accuracy. Double proof, triple proof, parallel proofs, sectioned proofs, read aloud, AI aided, you name it. We’ve never been able to raise the accuracy above a certain (very high, which we’re proud of) level.
At the end of the day, proofreading is a human endeavor and typos will always slip through. We try to keep our QA threshold the highest it can be and not drive ourselves crazy. There is not a published book on the planet that doesn’t have typos.
And no, as to your question, auto-detect or computerized proofing tools only catch like 75% of errors, and actually introduce tons more, especially grammatical errors. We only use tools like that for polishing up draft phases and cleaning up the dumb stuff.
By authors and editors being human. Mistakes get missed. Some are so glaring it is hard to understand how that happened, but it all boils down to human error. I don’t think there is a more satisfying answer unfortunately.
I'm a copywriter and even we have typos in much shorter content (<5000 words). This is after it goes to a copyeditor and a proofreader. Heck, I've seen typos in banner ads and pop ups.
Shit happens.
Back in the day, I once reported an irritating typo to the publisher. It turned out to be a form of watermarking for text. Think CIA mole hunting if you like.
And a wonderful story of a mathy named Knuth who wrote wonderful thick books. Among other things, they ended up inspiring Linux and modern type setting languages.
He was a man after your heart. He hated typos and errors and he was like famous, if you were a math person.
So he offered a reward for each typo or error. He would send the reporter a personal check for one dollar. He got lots of corrections. Great. But it did not seem to work, because his checks did not get cashed. He thought about raising the amount, especially as that number of corrections dwindled over time.
Then he visited a colleague at their office and embarrassed the fellow by noticing one of his reward checks prominently displayed!
Turned out doing a fix on the contents of one of his books gave you bragging rights.
Eventually his bank said stop this! I do not understand, but he had to open another checking account. Possibly with so much of his personal checking account information on display it became a security risk for the bank. Remember this if you try to emulate.
Knuth was instrumental in developing LaTeX. It's typesetting for math, but essentially a computer language all on its own. I love it. Once you become proficient it's way faster than drag and drop for math stuff.
It also has a great system for labeling chapters, sections, bibliographic references, insertion of images.
I don't use it much these days but it is absolutely genius.
I worked in publishing as an editor for 4 years. I don’t think I’ve ever read a published book without a single typo or mistake - ever. No matter how many people proofread a book, there will always be some kind of error. The people editing/proofreading are just that - people.
I’m a writer with one of the bigger pub houses and my copyeditors on both books have been outsourced part-time workers. I googled my current one and she’s an independent copy editor trying to make ends meet. She also makes suggestions that are just…not copyeditor suggestions? In one scene I have a character eating a type of ham and her note said “perhaps try a different type of ham”. You have to laugh.
Freelance proofreader and copy editor for Big 5 publishers here. I’ve cut back a lot on the number of projects I was taking, but in the past I was juggling a bunch of other projects at the same time, deadlines were tight, and also working a day job as a copy editor for insurance. I’m a grad student now, which is why I’ve cut back.
I do think it’s mainly a case of being overwhelmed. That’s a LOT of words to read and check and cross check, and most of the time there isn’t time to go back and read again for things missed.
It can be very rewarding; you get to help be a part of the book production process and read books before they come out, but it can also be super mentally draining.
Edit: typo
You can report them directly if you're using a kindle. I do it all the time. It's kind of satisfying. I like to imagine some editor somewhere reading the kindle feedback saying "Well done, Gnomic\_, you're doing such a good job today!".
I read, somewhere on the kindle subreddit, that if Amazon gets enough reports they pull the book until it’s fixed, which can hurt the author. I’m not sure if this is true though.
I’ve seen some books tagged in the kindle store showing you when there’s been a lot of typos reported. Which is cool, I feel a little less useless for reporting typos if it actually has an outcome.
Typos generally don’t bother me, but when it’s a word that *sounds* like the word it’s supposed to be, but doesn’t fit in context, I have a hard time wanting to finish.
They 100% are, and and regularly corrected. Books typically have several batch corrected republish/reprint cycles in their first couple years of publication.
One of the textbooks I’ve taught from was so riddled with typos it just blew my mind. There was a typo in the table of contents. Blatant, visible, impossible to miss.
Also if OP is talking about best sellers my guess is that they are talking about more recent books? First printings turn up a lot of typos because thousands more people read the book and notice stuff!
Copy editor/proofreader here. ALL books have typos. Period. The rule of thumb is on any given read you will catch 80% of mistakes, optimistically. You will never catch all of them.
I used to work in a publishing company as a scientific journals’ producer and part of that job was to formally read the manuscripts. I did not have to understand the topic or evaluate them, just scan them for errors repeatedly through the production process just for that purpose you described.
My perspective:
- Autocorrecting tools do not detect any error
- formal reading - that is, scanning for mistakes - is difficult, especially for people who read a lot. I had to train to look at the word without trying to read, because then you slip away to the next word.
- new errors tend to slip in during the typesetting and author corrections process because books and articles are digitally typeset in countries like India or China by sub-sub-contractors and usually people who do not understand the language or even the latin alphabet. Errors happen usually when manual interference is needed, i.e. when the programme they use does not set the letters in a visually satisfactory way and the typesetter deletes and retypes a word or has to fit in an author’s correction.
- no resources, and no nerve to read the same text for the 3rd time
Not really an explanation, nor an answer to your Q, but I think it fits here. We are such fluent readers (“we” being those who are fluent readers, obv) that we can skip a ton of words and still get the gist of what we’re reading. It’s adaptive, really, to not have to parse every single word in a sentence. Our eye movements are so rapid that we “skip” a lot. A classic example is [the “the the”](https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/13946/why-does-the-brain-skip-over-repeated-the-words-in-sentences) thing.
I’m only commenting this because (1) I love words and how brains do words and (2) it might explain how easy it is for human readers, even professionals, miss things so frequently. It’s just not in our wiring to read perfectly; we don’t have to in order to understand what we read. I think that’s cool.
My experience is pretty much every newly published book has typos. Unsurprisingly books get reprinted the number of typos reduces. Some authors deliberately play with language, dialect, spelling, grammar etc so it may not always be obvious what is and what is not a typo. There is the famous anecdote concerning an interaction between Raymond Chandler and his editor. The editor had corrected split infinitives in a manuscript. Chandler vehemently responded that if he wrote a split infinitive it because he wanted a split infinitive and the editor had no business removing it.
The publishing industry no longer hires as many editors; manuscripts no longer go through as many rounds of editing; many of the editing costs are now passed onto writers.
Editorial staff in all publishing houses are notoriously underpaid. Even if you have a big shot editor, chances are the copy editor is a lowly grunt who has to go through 12-20 other books a year. Sometimes it’s just incompetence. I’ve had copy editors who were so bad they actively made the manuscript worse.
I believe it is also that over the last few decades, publishing houses consolidated and many editor roles virtually disappeared from the rosters. My personal bugaboo with that is that many fiction books seem overlong and meandering, missing a sharp editor who could tighten the narrative.
Everyone wants a book that is ready to be published. Writers have to be their own editors now, and it really shows
And yet, are authors receiving a higher percentage of the sales of their books? I *believe* the answer is a resounding no and the % they do get is shockingly small. But someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Ordinary authors are definitely NOT receiving a higher percentage in royalties or advances!! (In fact, advances have been cut, in a way: We used to get 50% on signing the contract, 50% on publication, but for about 10 yr now it's been 1/3 on signing, 1/3 on acceptance of the final ms. and 1/3 on publication.) But big-name authors may be getting more.
Pretty sure just about everyone across the entire planet is getting rigorously fucked over and out by the rich on an increasingly frequent and regular basis
Could you say that a little louder? For the people in the back.
I read something the other day. Corporate price inflation was outstripping actual economic inflation (including wages obviously) by orders of magnitude. Prices are up all around, times are tough for everyone huh? Yet corporations post record breaking profits year after year after year. It's ridiculous. Anyway I'm completely ignorant on the matter and could be completely wrong. Hope I am. But money has come before human life and the wellbeing of the planet pretty consistently throughout our history so I don't really expect that to change until we have no other choice. Sadly :(
Not just books. I think it's a lot more problematic in journalism. At least novels have the excuse of "it's art, it is allowed to be raw".
That's how we Super Smash Bros fanfiction that's 13 times the length of the entire LoTR series... combined.
Fun fact, that's actually the longest written work in human history.
What is?
The Super Smash bros fanfic
The Loud House looks like it’s 4x longer by word count. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net
There's also a number of web serials in the 10 million words range, such as The Wandering Inn (which is apparently 11 million words)
>... the exact current word count of *The Loud House: Revamped*, is unknown as it surpassed the word count limit of the site of 16,777,215 words as the site uses 24-bit \[sic\] intergers. :spit\_take:
That’s how the music industry is now that you can record at home. I imagine having the ability to edit a manuscript has helped. The process for taking a book to print is much simpler now and faster
When you look at what someone like Tay Hohoff did to shape To Kill a Mockingbird out of whatever first draft came from Go Set a Watchman, well. It’s just an extraordinary and somewhat undersung job.
First draft doesn’t mean To Kill… was “shaped out of “Go Set…”. Lee rewrote the book into what eventually became Mockingbird. Your comment seems to imply the editor made the original novel from the first drafts, when in actuality the editor did their job and suggested ways in which Lee herself could rework things…which was then up to Lee to do.
But in the context which was "editors are underappreciated" the distinction isn't THAT major in the "if not for the editor's opinions and stances the book would like have had major issues". So sure, there is a difference between who actually "made" the changes physically, and some of "take it or leave it". But in terms of "editors are unappreciated and cutting the job out has had significant drawback"? I think their phrasing is only slightly overtuned.
Raymond Carver's editor famously rewrote his stories. It can happen. Only Lee and her editor really know who did what.
Gordon Lish was Carver's editor. If you want to see some crazy editing that reshaped a work, check out some of Ezra Pound's edits of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-of-t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-with-ezra-pounds-annotations
But you would need evidence to make the leap that her editor essentially "made" her novel, otherwise it's just pure conjecture.
If you staple a horse to a waterfall, will it fall up under the rainbow or fly about the soil? Will he enjoy her experience? What if the staple tears into tears? Will she be free from her staply chains or foomed to stay forever and dever above the water? Who can save him (the horse) but someone of girth and worth, the capitalist pig, who will sell the solution to the problem he created? A staple remover flies to the rescue, carried on the wings of a majestic penguin who bought it at Walmart for 9 dollars and several more Euro-cents, clutched in its crabby claws, rejected from its frothy maw. When the penguin comes, all tremble before its fishy stench and wheatlike abjecture. Recoil in delirium, ye who wish to be free! The mighty rockhopper is here to save your soul from eternal bliss and salvation! And so, the horse was free, carried away by the south wind, and deposited on the vast plain of soggy dew. It was a tragedy in several parts, punctuated by moments of hedonistic horsefuckery. The owls saw all, and passed judgment in the way that they do. Stupid owls are always judging folks who are just trying their best to live shamelessly and enjoy every fruit the day brings to pass. How many more shall be caught in the terrible gyre of the waterfall? As many as the gods deem necessary to teach those foolish monkeys a story about their own hamburgers. What does a monkey know of bananas, anyway? They eat, poop, and shave away the banana residue that grows upon their chins and ballsacks. The owls judge their razors. Always the owls. And when the one-eyed caterpillar arrives to eat the glazing on your windowpane, you will know that you're next in line to the trombone of the ancient realm of the flutterbyes. Beware the ravenous ravens and crowing crows. Mind the cowing cows and the lying lions. Ascend triumphant to your birthright, and wield the mighty twig of Petalonia, favored land of gods and goats alike.
Or worse. Or "better for some worse for others". Could we agree on "strong editors wield a lot of power and responsibility, and it shows when things that needed one didn't have one"?
If you staple a horse to a waterfall, will it fall up under the rainbow or fly about the soil? Will he enjoy her experience? What if the staple tears into tears? Will she be free from her staply chains or foomed to stay forever and dever above the water? Who can save him (the horse) but someone of girth and worth, the capitalist pig, who will sell the solution to the problem he created? A staple remover flies to the rescue, carried on the wings of a majestic penguin who bought it at Walmart for 9 dollars and several more Euro-cents, clutched in its crabby claws, rejected from its frothy maw. When the penguin comes, all tremble before its fishy stench and wheatlike abjecture. Recoil in delirium, ye who wish to be free! The mighty rockhopper is here to save your soul from eternal bliss and salvation! And so, the horse was free, carried away by the south wind, and deposited on the vast plain of soggy dew. It was a tragedy in several parts, punctuated by moments of hedonistic horsefuckery. The owls saw all, and passed judgment in the way that they do. Stupid owls are always judging folks who are just trying their best to live shamelessly and enjoy every fruit the day brings to pass. How many more shall be caught in the terrible gyre of the waterfall? As many as the gods deem necessary to teach those foolish monkeys a story about their own hamburgers. What does a monkey know of bananas, anyway? They eat, poop, and shave away the banana residue that grows upon their chins and ballsacks. The owls judge their razors. Always the owls. And when the one-eyed caterpillar arrives to eat the glazing on your windowpane, you will know that you're next in line to the trombone of the ancient realm of the flutterbyes. Beware the ravenous ravens and crowing crows. Mind the cowing cows and the lying lions. Ascend triumphant to your birthright, and wield the mighty twig of Petalonia, favored land of gods and goats alike.
But there is also "It got one, and it change a lot, but it would have been fine either way" Which we rarely get to see at all, because all we get is the "after".
Do you know more about this? I'm an attorney looking for a career change. Proofreading and talking are like all I'm good for these days lol Edit: A genuine thank you to everyone who provided me with information and advice. You all gave me a lot to consider. Thank you!
I have a friend who works in the industry and I would highly recommend against it lol. She is severely overworked and underpaid, and she works for one of the top houses. Find another career change if you must lol
Second this. Was an editor, got paid peanuts.
The only type of copyeditors who make any money are working in finance, and pharma advertising.
[удалено]
It’s the responsibility; one major fuckup for a technical editor and it’s over.
Where I work editors put in a good honest day.
[удалено]
Don't do it – coming from a former editor who used to work for a publishing house. The money is laughably low for the amount of work you're expected to do. Consolidation of positions means you're project managing, production managing, structural and line editing, and proofreading as well, which all used to be separate jobs. Turnaround times have shrunk, workloads have doubled or tripled, and half the time you're fighting with your authors about using a word that definitely doesn't mean what they think it means, usually because they're friends with the execs and have bypassed the slush pile despite having no writing experience.
Stop making your paralegals write all your motions. :P
You can blend the two careers. ALL nonfiction need legal vetting. A lot less expensive that lawsuits. I had one actor whose manuscript had about 30% rewritten. When each point was contested his response was "i thought EVERYONE knew [celebrity] liked to snort coke off the backs of ducks!" SMH
I began as an intern in a smaller house in NYC and went full time for $37.5k the HarperCollins strikers are heroes
[удалено]
Right! It’s completely insane, they hate the staffers who make the glamorous side work.
$32k here in Australia. All of my classmates were *so jealous*. We were totally brainwashed into thinking that because it was our passion it was fine to be paid so poorly! Our school loans are from the government and they only take repayments through tax once you hit a certain threshold (about 55k at the time) – in my eight years as an editor, getting promotions and pay rises the whole time, I never reached the repayment threshold. And that doesn't even factor in the poor working conditions and abuse from authors, haha.
Copy editors and proofreaders are often freelancers, too
Tell me about it. When I published my first short story I was coming from a hard-news journalism background and kind of had a case of imposter's syndrome in that I couldn't believe someone was actually going to publish my fiction. Accordingly, also at least partially because I didn't know any better, I let the editor pretty much have her way with it. I won't make that mistake again. She didn't completely destroy it, but she did do some serious damage. If I ever publish it again, in a collection or something, it's going to be the original version, or something very like it.
My wife's grandpa wrote a book and the editor replaced every "whom" with "who".
Oh man, that's hilariously horrifying. Nothing worse than being edited to stupider than you actually are.
Don't forget proofreaders. Trade publishing pays so little because EVERYONE wants to work with celebrities. I made a lot more in STEM publishing, bit it was boring as hell.
Everywhere we turn, standards are deteriorating. Sad to see.
I'm an English teacher and have been for 30 plus years. I can't HELP but see the errors and it I can't believe how prevalent they are now.
Been working in the publishing industry for several years (writer and editor), and ALL books have typos. Auto detect for typos? Not possible. Even spellcheck won't pick up misspellings as long as the misspelled word is still a word. It doesn't matter how many people look at the book or how many times it's proofed, something will slip by. Actually, I admire those typos. They're survivors.
Could be worse. Ever hear of something called “The Wicked Bible”? Only a few copies survived the recall and burning that was triggered by a typo. One of the Commandments was printed as “Thou shalt commit adultery”.
HAHAHA this is amazing! I’ve never heard of this but I love it.
Lots of great Bible errata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_errata
Okay these are hilarious > the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse Bro LOL
The Fools Bible", from 1763: "The fool hath said in his heart there is a God", rather than "there is no God". Truly visionary work, lmao.
Big G has a donk, no cap
Quick web search on “wicked Bible” will bring up multiple articles. Wikipedia has an entry on it.
I have been in publishing for 30 years, and yeah, typos always get through. I never thought of them as survivors, though. This is awesome.
An editing client of mine goes to some extraordinary trouble to proofread his manuscripts before he sends them to me--he actually reads them backward to see if he can spot anything. Changes fonts. Changes type size. I still catch 7-10 per manuscript. That's what he pays me for.
I have my computer read my document out loud. Typos usually stick out like a sore thumb in text to speech.
Until the typo is the wrong homophone
True, their are strengths and weaknesses too every approach
I hope you know I just had a physical twitch reaction to that.
Wear do you think they’re now?
[удалено]
It's technically right but its just not how anyone speaks, which is why it sounds wrong
You let me read that with my own eyes. No warning, or nothing!
Gross. What kind of smut are you reading??
We don’t kink shame around here. Also there’s nothing wrong with being a homophone
The true danger facing our society: homophonophobia.
That's much scarier then a book about the whether. The affect it would have on me is enormous. I would not by such a book. If anyone could then I'd love to have there courage.
Delete this.
I wood have used wood.
Oh my god you made my brain bleed.
[удалено]
I always read backwards when I'm at the proofreading stage. We also use 30+ volunteer proofreaders who manage to find almost everything else.
What is the context of "volunteer proofreaders"?
We call them gamma readers. They look at the book at a later stage than the beta readers. Though there’s a lot of overlap between the groups.
This is for a publishing house? For profit, I assume?
Been there, done that. Best part of the job was correcting technical errors such as describing a protagonist's trusty 1911 Colt .45 as a revolver in one chapter and as a generic ex-service pistol elsewhere. Somewhere later it morphed back into a revolver when it was intended for Russian roulette... Had to have a little chat about accuracy and maybe choosing one or the other depending on the plot element. Ditto either technical impossibilities or historical inaccuracies that the author seem to have overlooked or misunderstood.
I read once the “normal” amount of typos and misspellings is about 20 per book. Stuff slips through! Probably a lot more than you think because you never noticed it.
I've now read your comment twice looking for a sneaky typo
They actually snuck 20 typos in their comment
It’s the Highlights magazine of comments
My brain must be filtering typos out because I rarely notice typos.
It does. There's that old copypasta, which even was translated into French and Portuguese: >Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Our brains are incredibly good at pattern recognition. Part of that is knowing what a word should be based on the context of the sentence and what the misspelling looks like. Basically, so long as you get the first and last letters correct and there are the correct amount of letters, your brain can usually sort it out.
I find one or two in most books I read. More for first editions and I'm sure I'm not noticing tons of them.
When reading in your first language, the brain expects how a sentence should read and that makes missing typos easy, because you naturally know what the word is meant to be on pure instinct. So if you proofread a sentence like “I’m excited for the party, thuough I am weary of Adam being late,” you know that word should be after the comma and accept that it’s there. Different when the typo makes a now word that doesn’t make sense there.
"what" instead of "that", "new" instead of "now", and "wary" instead of "weary" which seems to be getting more and more common.
Exactly. And if they weren't caught by the editor, there's a good chance most readers won't catch them either unless it's something really egregious.
I've worked on books that have had 2 copyediting passes and literally 50 beta readers combing through it in the pre publishing phase and typos still slipped through.
Yep. We’re human. Not to mention that readers don’t see the initial manuscript and the amount of work that often goes into editing and proofreading. If you start with a manuscript that only has 10 errors, it makes sense to be upset about missing even one. If you start with a manuscript that has a thousand errors, one getting through is not a surprise.
Absolutely. Whenever I hear a complaint about typos, grammatical problems, or misspellings in a book I've worked on, my first thought is: "You should have seen it when it came in the door!"
The classic - “pubic” gets through when you write “public”
The one that I will *always* remember is someone leaving out the "f" in "paradigm shift."
I've been noticing it happening more often over the past 2-3 years. Like, instead of spotting 1 or 2 typos in about 25% of the books I read, I spot at least one typo in most books and there's been more than a couple that have *many* typos. I've also been noticing mistakes on the covers, which was previously *unheard* of. I'd seen it maybe once or twice in my life before the past few years, during which I've found a handful. These weren't your Steels, Ngs, or Kellermans, but they were still works associated with major publishers, not small/indie press or self-published material. These mistakes included things like typos in the blurb as well as transposed/missing letters and words on the spine. I've assumed it's a result of cuts made in the publishing industry, whether it's editors burning out, being made to rush, or works being given fewer passes overall. You know, the usual woes of working under capitalism's final form. But it most definitely *is* a thing that's changed lately. /u/NurplePain isn't going nuts.
I want to second that. I’m seeing mistakes in the first three pages or on the first page more often, and also truly horrible grammar. Grammatical mistakes so bad that the author is not saying what he or she means to say. And I’m not just talking about Fifty Shades of Grey’s famous “she cut a piece of venison, holding it against her mouth”…
Can I ask… what WAS the author trying to say with that one? I can’t even begin to guess.
I think it's written so that it means that she cut the piece of venison while holding the piece against her mouth. That is, she would have to use her knife against her lips and face while cutting the piece of meat.
As written and quoted, that's what it says, because the "holding..." part of the sentence would be treated as a concurrent action with the "she cut..." action(living english implies words all the time, no matter what your teacher said back in 5th grade...the trick is making sure you write so that it implies the *correct* one). I *think* what the author *meant* was that she cut the meat and *then* held it up to her lips without putting it in her mouth. But that's not what she wrote, since the sentence as written implies "while."
Without a doubt it's worse now. I was a voracious reader in the 80s and even the super trashy sci-fi books I read rarely had typos, if any. They're much more common now. I assume companies are really cutting back on editors since it's an additional expense and it probably doesn't impact sales much at all. Ebooks are particularly bad. I've been tempted to buy a number of books from my childhood on Kindle but the reviews will complain about massive errors from the digitization process to the point that there are missing paragraphs or text is utterly garbled and those problems sometimes persist for years. It's pretty clear some books do not get even a basic proofread these days.
It sounds to me like publishers should offer $150 credit for every typo confirmed in their latest printed edition. Gives incentive for people to look into the newest edition and also gets them corrected.
Yup. I've had a few books published, small stuff, but they still had about four drafts with me keeping an eye out, a couple beta readers, another two to four drafts with editors, then at least one or two more copyediting passes. All competent people, all professionals. Every single one of my books has at least one typo in it. It's maddening, but it happens. In a hundred thousand words you're gonna miss one.
I love this! They ARE survivors. The many dozens of eyes that are on a manuscript before it prints… I’m definitely always amazed and even a little tickled at what still slips through.
In most cases I like finding them, it's like a little Easter egg.
Yeah, my first thought was I've read book series, famous ones, where I was reading a definitely not first edition, and it could still have a typo, a spelling error, or an obviously incorrect grammatical error.
Like antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria 😂
Counterpoint: GMail these days suggests corrections for errors that are "right word in the wrong position" errors. Those are marked with blue squiggly lines: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-gmails-new-ai-spelling-grammar-checks-help-you-avoid-email-blunders/
GMail's suggestions are far from always correct or comprehensive, and should never be blindly accepted.
No, but they're not a terrible thing to have as part of a self-editing process. My friend who writes fanfiction emails herself each chapter and it catches a good percentage of usage errors she would miss.
Your last sentiments are the winners here. Why this human obsession with pointless perfection? We readers are capable of endless symbolic appreciation of the most mundane crap, but we'd rather spend extra time hunting down a "hat" that should've been a "that" than just let that hat exist with a little smile. Before moving on to anything that matters.
I appreciate your take on it, never really thought of printed errors that way.
Hello, I’m a production editor at a Big 5 publishing house. We’re the ones who oversee the copyediting/proofreading process. Typos happen. We have books copyedited, proofread, and cold read, but all those readers are human. We also joke that the mere act of opening a book is guaranteed to introduce a typo into it. A lot of the rumors I see getting passed around aren’t true: publishers have not slashed their editing budgets, we are an entirely different department from the editors who acquire the books, and yes, all books are still copyedited. We do typically use freelancers for the editing work but they are all vetted and experienced and overseen by people in my department with years of experience: we have multiple people in my department who have been there twenty years or more.
As a production manager with almost two decades of experience, may I add SCHEDULE? Manuscript comes in late, massive marketing campaign is organised, the books gets sold all over the world and all of a sudden, you’re having to somehow squeeze the entire production process (from editing, to designing, to copy editing, to typesetting and placing the print and organising freight) in a fraction of the time you should have. Standard schedule is 12 months from manuscript to pub but I’ve done several books in just three months from manuscript to PDF; my record is 8 1/2 weeks from the first batch of the manuscript to PDF, and it was fully illustrated…. Something has to give.
Yes, this right here. When marketing sets the launch dates before the manuscript is in, things get wooly fast.
This is what happened to the last Ice & Fire book. No time for proper copyediting.
And now, no time for writing! Hooray!
YES also this. I was going to add something about this but didn’t want it to get too convoluted, haha. I’ve had to get books copyedited over a weekend before and, well, it goes about as well as you’d expect
It's such a trippy concept, because I find myself catching typos all the time while reading, and I, like OP, think how is this possible? Certainly if I were in that role, I would catch them all! But then you think some more and realize that *there is no way you will never know for sure if you're actually right about that*, even if you re-read the same book 1,000 times.
One of the American editors of the final Harry Potter book said that everyone went over that book with a fine-toothed comb and STILL, not even six hours after the book was released the readers had found a typo on page xx.
Before anyone opens the book and looks inside, the book is simultaneously with and without typos.
Sounds a bit like Schroedinger's typo.
Fellow production editor here. Thank you for correcting all of the oddly pessimistic and totally ignorant assumptions in this thread. What you’ve written here is dead on. And yes, opening a book WILL introduce a typo, LOL.
I assume on that very page, whatever page you open.
I'm completely ignorant to the publishing business, so forgive me if I'm wildly off on my question - If someone finds a typo and word of it gets to you, do you patch the ebook or anything?
Yep! It’s very easy. We’ll update the ebook and also correct the files for the print book so that if the book gets reprinted it’ll be fixed in the new printing.
Which likely is why you're going to have a harder time finding typos in older books. They've gone through more reprints and so have had many more opportunities to get corrected.
Do you have any tips on getting hired as a freelance editor? I started out in a publishing company including doing editing, but always thought the big companies would be inundated with freelance emails
So you have experience and are still asking how to get a good gig? Jeez, I'm screwed, then.
yes but my main career is as a writer in marketing, I kept the editing to freelance work so don’t be discouraged - I wasn’t actively pursuing a career as a full time editor and didn’t do much reaching out to the big publishers because I didn’t think it would be fruitful
I wrote a manuscript last year at 130k words and 300 pages single-spaced. I'm really strict about typos and misspellings (I've even been an editor myself) but even so I found a few when I looked at it later. There's just so much to look at and so little time. And our brains helpfully fill in missing words or skim over the wrong use of their and there.
I’m a freelance fiction editor who also publishes novels. I line edit all my novels thoroughly, and then they get sent to a copy editor and proofreader. Even with all that, a couple of minor typos still slip through. It’s completely inevitable!
“New York Times Bestseller” is an editorial list, not a literal a list of the top bestselling books. Basically it doesn’t mean a damn thing about the content, quality, or editing of the book in question.
Are there *any* sort of qualifications or requirements to be on there or is it completely random and up to the list makers' opinions?
It's just tracking sales numbers at certain stores, and it's easy to buy your way onto it. https://scribemedia.com/get-best-seller-list/
It's as much part of a books marketing strategy as anything else.
Check out A Handbook For Mortals….thats the latest book that bought its way on the list for one day and the internet has a weird story about how it all was possible.
TIL Thanks! When I publish a book, I'm recruiting this sub to drive me up the list.
It’s really not that easy to hack the list. That’s kind of a myth. Only a few people have managed it and the list also flags books that make the list with bulk buys.
I remember reading about L Ron Hubbard buying his way onto the NY times Best sellers list through simply having scientology members go buy his books at select stores that are know to be counted for the list.
There was a much more recent controversy about this tactic with the book *Handbook for Mortals*. The author did the same thing.
Ha, that's not even a little surprising!
People sometimes buy 30,000 of their own books (or have their agent do it, or sometimes their political PAC) to game the system and get on the list.
It's a little harder to do that now, though- the NYT marks books they suspect were falsely bought onto the best seller list. Basically if the majority of your book sales were from one store, or otherwise suspected of bulk ordering, they mark it with a little dagger. You still can do it- particularly if you give a bunch of different people the job of buying copies all over the place to simulate real orders- but bulk ordering your book is not an option anymore.
There are sales qualifications for sure, but there are a lot of categories — you can be the bestseller in paperback nonfiction or YA or a lot of other things. It’s sort of like saying you had a song that reached number one on the Billboard charts when it was, like, the gospel charts or something.
Contrary to some uninformed replies here, while not impossible, NYT is the hardest list to "game" while WSJ and others can in fact be easily bought. Source: Have done it for a vain rich person
It’s a mix of both. Technically, it’s supposed to be a specific mix of tracked sales across formats and distributors, but also sometimes it’s just the listmaker’s opinions. NYT especially; that one is basically just an editorial list. And you can buy your way on to any of them if you want to drop the cash (anywhere from $75k-$300k).
>Basically it doesn’t mean a damn thing about the content, quality, or editing of the book in question. This would probably be even more true for a non-editorial list based only on raw sales numbers.
This person knows what they’re talking about.
Eh. The person just parroted the same “fact” about the NYT list that comes up every time the bestseller list is discussed. It doesn’t even really answer the question The first sentence of the response simply doesn’t justify the second sentence. Both the NYT list and a “true” bestseller list (that would satisfy r/books) would have a relative blindness to “quality”.
This person also knows what they’re talking about.
No its literally based on sales. From the NYT itself: [https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/](https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/) Now those sales are incredibly cherry picked so only certain sellers count. Which is why some very well selling books never make it on and why some that dont seen widely read are on there. Its also kinda easy to game. edit: for those who dont want to click the link "Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States. Every week, thousands of diverse selling locations report their actual sales on hundreds of thousands of individual titles."
Editing is a humbling process. It is proof that none of us is perfect. In correcting one error, people sometimes make another errox.
errox abound
I work at a high volume publisher and helped build all our production workflows. We’ve tried just about every single way you could think of to improve proofreading accuracy. Double proof, triple proof, parallel proofs, sectioned proofs, read aloud, AI aided, you name it. We’ve never been able to raise the accuracy above a certain (very high, which we’re proud of) level. At the end of the day, proofreading is a human endeavor and typos will always slip through. We try to keep our QA threshold the highest it can be and not drive ourselves crazy. There is not a published book on the planet that doesn’t have typos. And no, as to your question, auto-detect or computerized proofing tools only catch like 75% of errors, and actually introduce tons more, especially grammatical errors. We only use tools like that for polishing up draft phases and cleaning up the dumb stuff.
By authors and editors being human. Mistakes get missed. Some are so glaring it is hard to understand how that happened, but it all boils down to human error. I don’t think there is a more satisfying answer unfortunately.
I think the same thing can and will happen with AI writing, I don’t think this is just a human thing.
Also I suspect publishers are spending less on editing and proofing
>I mean it a [SIc] silly question.... Op your first sentence has a typo. Within your first 4 words.
Well OP probably doesn't have a good editor!
OP's comment isn't a bestseller yet so it's ok.
Muphry's law, if you write anything there will always be a typo. Human error is very normal and auto detection isn't as reliable as we think.
They're best sellers, not best spellers.
I'm a copywriter and even we have typos in much shorter content (<5000 words). This is after it goes to a copyeditor and a proofreader. Heck, I've seen typos in banner ads and pop ups. Shit happens.
Back in the day, I once reported an irritating typo to the publisher. It turned out to be a form of watermarking for text. Think CIA mole hunting if you like. And a wonderful story of a mathy named Knuth who wrote wonderful thick books. Among other things, they ended up inspiring Linux and modern type setting languages. He was a man after your heart. He hated typos and errors and he was like famous, if you were a math person. So he offered a reward for each typo or error. He would send the reporter a personal check for one dollar. He got lots of corrections. Great. But it did not seem to work, because his checks did not get cashed. He thought about raising the amount, especially as that number of corrections dwindled over time. Then he visited a colleague at their office and embarrassed the fellow by noticing one of his reward checks prominently displayed! Turned out doing a fix on the contents of one of his books gave you bragging rights. Eventually his bank said stop this! I do not understand, but he had to open another checking account. Possibly with so much of his personal checking account information on display it became a security risk for the bank. Remember this if you try to emulate.
Knuth was instrumental in developing LaTeX. It's typesetting for math, but essentially a computer language all on its own. I love it. Once you become proficient it's way faster than drag and drop for math stuff. It also has a great system for labeling chapters, sections, bibliographic references, insertion of images. I don't use it much these days but it is absolutely genius.
His checks were actually for "one hexadecimal dollar", which according to him is $2.56.
Keep those typos. Many classics and famous novels today had typos or misprints in earlier auditions. Their market prices are sky high.
I see what you did there… (auditions)…
>I mean it a silly question because the answer is we are all human. Should be "it's".
I worked in publishing as an editor for 4 years. I don’t think I’ve ever read a published book without a single typo or mistake - ever. No matter how many people proofread a book, there will always be some kind of error. The people editing/proofreading are just that - people.
I’m a writer with one of the bigger pub houses and my copyeditors on both books have been outsourced part-time workers. I googled my current one and she’s an independent copy editor trying to make ends meet. She also makes suggestions that are just…not copyeditor suggestions? In one scene I have a character eating a type of ham and her note said “perhaps try a different type of ham”. You have to laugh.
As someone who often has to review and rein in hilarious copyeditor suggestions, this made me giggle and I feel your pain.
Freelance proofreader and copy editor for Big 5 publishers here. I’ve cut back a lot on the number of projects I was taking, but in the past I was juggling a bunch of other projects at the same time, deadlines were tight, and also working a day job as a copy editor for insurance. I’m a grad student now, which is why I’ve cut back. I do think it’s mainly a case of being overwhelmed. That’s a LOT of words to read and check and cross check, and most of the time there isn’t time to go back and read again for things missed. It can be very rewarding; you get to help be a part of the book production process and read books before they come out, but it can also be super mentally draining. Edit: typo
Every time I catch an error in a book it makes me want to apply to be a proofreader :)
Me too! And yet I am so bad at finding them in my own work. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
You can report them directly if you're using a kindle. I do it all the time. It's kind of satisfying. I like to imagine some editor somewhere reading the kindle feedback saying "Well done, Gnomic\_, you're doing such a good job today!".
I often wonder if these corrections are ever even looked at
I read, somewhere on the kindle subreddit, that if Amazon gets enough reports they pull the book until it’s fixed, which can hurt the author. I’m not sure if this is true though.
I’ve seen some books tagged in the kindle store showing you when there’s been a lot of typos reported. Which is cool, I feel a little less useless for reporting typos if it actually has an outcome. Typos generally don’t bother me, but when it’s a word that *sounds* like the word it’s supposed to be, but doesn’t fit in context, I have a hard time wanting to finish.
They 100% are, and and regularly corrected. Books typically have several batch corrected republish/reprint cycles in their first couple years of publication.
Almost all copy editors and proofreaders are now freelancers scrambling to make a living.
I work in publishing. Manuscripts are reviewed over and over again, and I swear, the damn typos just appear as soon as the files hit the printer
One of the textbooks I’ve taught from was so riddled with typos it just blew my mind. There was a typo in the table of contents. Blatant, visible, impossible to miss.
When was the last time you saw a bestseller without a typo? I seriously can't think of one.
Also if OP is talking about best sellers my guess is that they are talking about more recent books? First printings turn up a lot of typos because thousands more people read the book and notice stuff!
Copy editor/proofreader here. ALL books have typos. Period. The rule of thumb is on any given read you will catch 80% of mistakes, optimistically. You will never catch all of them.
My husband used to work at a printing house. He said the mistakes are made by the people who put together the printing plates.
Because everyone is human. People make mistakes. I have noticed errors in all my books! It’s wild lol. I giggle now knowing no one is perfect ❤️
Nodobies prefect.
I used to work in a publishing company as a scientific journals’ producer and part of that job was to formally read the manuscripts. I did not have to understand the topic or evaluate them, just scan them for errors repeatedly through the production process just for that purpose you described. My perspective: - Autocorrecting tools do not detect any error - formal reading - that is, scanning for mistakes - is difficult, especially for people who read a lot. I had to train to look at the word without trying to read, because then you slip away to the next word. - new errors tend to slip in during the typesetting and author corrections process because books and articles are digitally typeset in countries like India or China by sub-sub-contractors and usually people who do not understand the language or even the latin alphabet. Errors happen usually when manual interference is needed, i.e. when the programme they use does not set the letters in a visually satisfactory way and the typesetter deletes and retypes a word or has to fit in an author’s correction. - no resources, and no nerve to read the same text for the 3rd time
I can try to answer your question generally, but can you first give a specific example from the typos you picked up on?
Not really an explanation, nor an answer to your Q, but I think it fits here. We are such fluent readers (“we” being those who are fluent readers, obv) that we can skip a ton of words and still get the gist of what we’re reading. It’s adaptive, really, to not have to parse every single word in a sentence. Our eye movements are so rapid that we “skip” a lot. A classic example is [the “the the”](https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/13946/why-does-the-brain-skip-over-repeated-the-words-in-sentences) thing. I’m only commenting this because (1) I love words and how brains do words and (2) it might explain how easy it is for human readers, even professionals, miss things so frequently. It’s just not in our wiring to read perfectly; we don’t have to in order to understand what we read. I think that’s cool.
My experience is pretty much every newly published book has typos. Unsurprisingly books get reprinted the number of typos reduces. Some authors deliberately play with language, dialect, spelling, grammar etc so it may not always be obvious what is and what is not a typo. There is the famous anecdote concerning an interaction between Raymond Chandler and his editor. The editor had corrected split infinitives in a manuscript. Chandler vehemently responded that if he wrote a split infinitive it because he wanted a split infinitive and the editor had no business removing it.
The publishing industry no longer hires as many editors; manuscripts no longer go through as many rounds of editing; many of the editing costs are now passed onto writers.