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Old 03-26-2011, 12:55 PM   #49
Anke Wehner
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Posts: 249
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Germany
Device: PRS-650
I don't know... I had to read "great literature" at school, and found most of it aggravating and/or boring. That rather puts me off the whole "you need professionals to tell you which books are good" mindset.

I guess that makes me a non-sophisticated reader.

There's a huge can of worms there regarding "what makes a good book?" The way I see it, there aren't really any objective standards for that, because each reader will have different criteria for what makes a book enjoyable.

And regarding copy-editing and formatting, well.
In the last indie book I read I noticed 3 typos/spelling mistakes on ~300 pages, and there were about that many instances of entirely blank pages before a new chapter (which I'm pretty sure stem from having to compromise a bit for the multi-format conversion on Smashwords).
In the last professionally published ebook I read I spotted 5 typos/spelling mistakes on ~200 pages, and it had the quotes at the chapter beginnings formatted with far too wide margins.
The second to last professionally published ebook had superfluous spaces around punctuation where they didn't belong every couple of pages, and a handful of linebreaks where they didn't belong, or linebreaks that were missing when in a dialogue scene speakers switched. (That book was as-bought from Kobo, not converted in any way.)

Oh, and the two "professional" books had generic graphics for covers.

So, yeah, I don't get the impression traditional publishers do better on the last cleanup than an indie author who's serious about it.
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