Quote:
Originally Posted by wyndslash
call me prejudiced, but i am rather leery of downloading ebooks that did not go through an editor/publishing house. i got a free one, and while i thoroughly enjoyed the plot and the characters, there were a few errors but it did jolt me out of the pleasure of reading for a bit (used bust instead of burst). i certainly hope that these types of errors would be lessened in the future as ebooks become more popular and there would be more professional editors doing freelancing or part-time work. i was thinking of buying the rest of the author's series, but i am hesitating...
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This has been and is being discussed elsewhere on MR. There's a lot of confusion about the editor's job and what value the editor adds to the finished product.
I know an assortment of published writers. Every one of them credits a good editor with helping them to craft a better book. The editor is a trained second pair of eyes, whose job is to see problems with plot structure, issues with characters, questions of pacing, and all of the other things that can impede a book. Identifying those things that "bust you out of a book" is part of the editor's job. This happens in what is known as a "line edit", and is part of the development process when a publisher acquires a book.
Unsolicited manuscripts submitted to publisher are known as "slush", and the collection that accumulates is the "slush pile".
Reading slush is probably an editor's least favorite chore. Most of it is appallingly bad. One of the biggest services editors perform is
rejecting manuscripts that are unfit to publish. (A late friend who was an editor commented that a variant of the "80/20 rule" applied. 80% of the manuscripts that came in the mail were automatic rejects. Perhaps 10% if he was lucky were automatic buys. It was the other 10%, the ones that
could make the cut with some assistance, that took the majority of the time.)
With the Internet and ebooks, the Internet is now the biggest slush pile in history. The tools are there, and
anyone can get "published". The vast majority of such efforts have not had the benefit of an editor, and show it.
It's a problem all over. Editors are skilled professionals. Good editing costs money. Self-published authors are reluctant to spend the money, (assuming they are capable of admitting that they
need it.) Regular publishers are increasingly skimping on editing (with proofreading the first to go), because they are trying to keep costs down. A lot of ebook readers who ought to know better just want their ebooks
cheap and suggest line edits not be done to save the costs.
Call me prejudiced as well. I have more books that I want to read now than time to read them, and no time to waste panning for the occasional nugget of gold in the mountain of slush. There is decent self-published work out there, but the majority I can think of is by authors who learned their craft, honed their skills and built their audience going through traditional publishing, with sharp eyed editors to identify the problems that needed correcting.
I get traditionally published books, too. And given what I normally read for recreation, there's a good chance I know the author who wrote the book, and the editor who bought and line edited it.
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Dennis