Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
BPH = Big Publishing House
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Wolfie:
That's because--and no, gang, I'm not making this up, and I'm not being..whatever I'll be accused of being, bigoted, racist, whatever--they send the books to India. Now, there is nothing wrong with the folks in India, except, in order to do the books very cheaply, they use labor that doesn't really have a solid grasp of the English language. So they don't notice broken paragraphs, etc. And, in some of the firms, their comprehension of the needed technical skills is learned by rote--not actually learned, if that makes any sense.
How do I know this? For I have used several different firms in India at different times for overflow. I had one firm, with a US rep, tell me, indignantly, that their work was "...good enough for Createspace and Nook and Random House." Yes...but it wasn't good enough for me. Why? Because unlike those entities, my client is the book's creator. They are, to put it bluntly, "only" the publisher, and their proofreaders don't go over every sentence with a fine-toothed comb to see if, god forbid, a comma is out of place.
Now, this isn't to claim that the manuscripts we get in are in remotely good shape, either--but that's exactly WHY you need skilled people working in either their Native language OR a real grasp of the language in which they are working. Not having the language skills--and NOT getting called on crappy work (e.g., not spotting broken paragraphs from a s****y PDF->Word conversion)--means that their quality doesn't improve.
It is also abalooley true--and I'm damned if I know why this is--but for some reason, errors leap out more abruptly, or rudely, or whatever, in eBooks. Maybe the people who buy e-readers and ebooks are a more particular class of reader; maybe they're not; but when I've had books come back in for "redos," for error corrections (provided to the author/publisher by the ever-helpful reading community), and I check, on backlist print books, the same grammer, typo, etc., errors will be in the book that sat fat and happy in print for 20 years, without the plethora of "reader-captured errors." There's also a certain DEMAND to the reading crowd now--a sense of instancy, of immediacy, in that they expect that the errors that they find have to be
corrected right this second; whereas in the days of yore, if something needed to be fixed, they waited until the 2nd printing, or what-have-you. There seems to be a blithe disregard of the author/publisher's costs to reissue an ebook every 30 days to fix "reader complaints" about typos.
Personally, I tell my clients to save 'em up for 6 months. I think correcting them like a bipolar on a manic streak every 30-45 days is insanity.
And, dem's the <break>
reasons, folks.
Hitch
