[karunaji]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

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As my late mother used to say, "Pish."

I've proofread professional books and I can assure you that it doesn't take anywhere near 100 hours. Any freelance proofreader who required more than two weeks to proof a 100,000-word book, and charged accordingly, would find himself repeating, "Would you like fries with that?" in short order.

Proofreading 1000 w/hour is a standard industry average for business texts assuming they are written by professional copy-writers or translators. In fact, it is very hard to put a strict number because each text is different. Maybe fiction is easier because there is less interest in fact checking. On the other hand, fiction requires more polished style and that's even harder because there are no objective measures.

If publishers truly edited books these days and worked to develop manuscripts, that$15,000 figure might ring true. But they don't.

I don't really know but most self-published books are kind of rough in terms of language. Behind each successful author there is a good editor.

There is a food for thought. Most journalist articles have some boo-boos. Factual, stylistic, inconsistencies, even typos etc. It reflects the nature of that industry (time, money constraints). Will public accept the same level of quality from e-books?

An author had better have a typeset-ready manuscript before submitting

It is an impossible task for most authors. More detail below.

The major publishers have one thing to sell, and that's cachet. As long as they can convincingly paint themselves as the anointed ones who choose only the best for you, the reader, they'll have a function. Once readers discover the little man behind the curtain, they're history.

I agree that big publishing houses have nothing substantial to add. The cost savings they can provide are minimal and the corporate need for ever increasing profits is damaging. Not comparable with car production which consists of thousands of parts that all require big investments in R&D, engineering, materials etc.

Why does it take so long and costs so much? Don't the authors use spell-check? Do they give the publishers just a really long txt file that isn't divided into chapters and paragraphs? Just how bad are the initial unaided words of the authors that they need 100 hours of work to fix?

Certainly the author's first draft should be very well written otherwise even the best editor won't be able to do anything to improve it. However, typos and submitted format are easy to fix and are irrelevant. Editing is delving into most minute details, it is like final polishing, very subjective and yet it is worth it every penny. If the story has even one rugged edge or word, it throws off reader's imagination. It costs $1 to fix this word and $10,000 to know which word to fix