Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Ah but with e-books the production costs are minimal, basically editing is all that's required. And I'm of the opinion that authors need to learn to edit their own work. It's not that hard.
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An author editing and proofing their own work is exactly like a lawyer defending themselves in court... they have a fool for a client... Kov, I respect your work on calibre immensely but as far as editing your own work, rubbish... it's not like writing code etc where you can have things checked by the sytem and you get logs of error messages... and saying "It's not that hard." is insulting to all pro and semi-pro proofreaders who have acquired the necessary skills after all coding isn't that hard, just a few words, letters and numbers to make a program after all...
If you write it then you don't do more than rough proof it with spellchecks and read through but the result will not be good because, as the author, you know what is supposed to be there and your mind will gloss of over errors and see what you expect to see... proofreading is a skilled occupation and not a casual "well, I can read so I'll proof this" past time...
this is self evident in the ever growing number of appallingly proofed books appearing from everybody ranging through big pubs to indies and one-offs.
And that isn't even covering editing the material which is a totally different job from proofing...
