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Originally Posted by Gudy
Jacqueline Carey - Santa Olivia.
No, I have no compunction about shaming those that need shaming. I generally like her books (apart from the Sundering titles, which I just couldn't get into). I even liked Santa Olivia a great deal, but the whole "w/c/should of" issue was enough to make me think long and hard about whether or not I wanted to a) finish the book and b) buy the sequel.
And no, while the narrator definitely had a tangible personality, it was not a first person narrator. There were also no other indicators (at least that I noticed) that would have made the decision to use those grammatically wrong constructions in any way defensible.
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Actually, "would of," "could of" and "should of" are three of my personal pet peeve/no-fly-zone items. Unless an author has deliberately placed it in dialect to indicate illiteracy, it's an instant book-tosser for me.
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Funny, so you're telling me I don't exist? I am, along with half a dozen people, a beta reader for a probably less-than-midlist, self-published author (who also happens to have an account here). And yes, we do both plot and proof reading at different stages of the process. Combined with the gratifyingly excellent command of the English language which said author brings to the table, I think the result is, if not perfect then at least hugely better than most self-published authors and in fact easily competitive with what I've seen from big name publishers over the last couple of years.
As for what it takes to get those fabled betas, I can only tell you what it looks from my end. But the key seems to be to cultivate your fans. Interact with them, get them emotionally involved, get to know them so you have some hope of finding ones who can actually help you in the process instead of simply being a gushing fan girl/boy. I realize that not every author can do this, either because they don't have fans or because they don't know how to cultivate them as a community, but my gut feeling is that the Dan Browns and Laurell K. Hamiltons of the world with their readership in the tens of millions or more may very well have a harder time of it than mid-list authors with a smaller following.
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Nope, I'm telling you that
in general, you don't exist. How many of you do you think there are? Firstly, you're a writer yourself, so you're willing to beta-read other writers, in order to earn that reciprocity. Secondly,
you have fans. I don't think it takes the brain cells of Oppenheimer to take one glance at Smashwords, or Amazon, etc., to see that most self-published authors don't; most are desperate for something as simple as a
single review, much less a beta-reader. You're active on
this forum, as an author--not merely the "pimp my book" forum--which makes you unusual in the first place. As we're talking about books in quantity, I think it would be only fair for you to admit that you or your equivalent mightn't be sitting on every street-corner for the average first- or second-time writer. Not to mention, back to the original topic, beta-readers who can ALSO edit or proof? A Chimera, indeed, based upon my own observations just in "critique groups," which have also proliferated like rats and are almost as worthwhile, having succumbed in large part to the "nicey-nicey" mentality that has become so pervasive in the modern age, in which everyone's self-esteem is actually more valuable than their real worth.
It's possible that the sheer mountain of manuscripts I have to plow through every day for quotation alone (never mind production issues) taints my view, or skews my opinion--but I have absolutely seen books with 1, 2 and 3
professional edits that were
still unreadable and rife with errors. You can make me believe that you, yourself, and your reading companion, might be horses with horns on your heads--but you can't make me believe in a race of unicorns. My higher-end midlisters do have beta-readers; but one of them is the author I mentioned in a recent blog post that got a nastygram from Amazon telling him to remove a book and "fix" it (over a single error). I guess my question to you would be: would you be a beta-reader if you didn't have skin in the game? You might think that as a (patently) vociferous reader, you would be...but I suspect that, as you mentioned, for the average author that requires fans...which, IMHO, gets us back to square one, which is: producing a clean, edited, proofed book that will garner fans in the first instance. Chicken-egg-chicken-egg.....
As previously mentioned: JMHO.
Hitch