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Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
But in the last 10 years I see mistakes of a different nature--cars in two places at once, something contradicting a previous paragraph--things that I think some editors would have caught. They simply aren't caught as often anymore.
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Quite true - I'm currently reading one where there are three different spellings of a character's name, and I'm finding it very annoying. But is it a case that editors aren't as good about catching mistakes, or that editing is being skipped altogether? I suspect that in at least some cases, it's the latter - for instance, in this same book, most of the mistakes are homonyms, which a spellchecker woudn't pick up, but any half-decent editor should.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
This is exactly what the copy editor does. And the major publishers certainly do still use copy editors, and not just for their highest profile authors.
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TBH, I'm not entirely sure that's true any longer. IME, and as others have pointed out, publishers are becoming increasingly reluctant to pay for copyeditors, even though readers are becoming far more aware of the importance of editing and proofreading, if the increasing number of book reviews mentioning the dire spelling and grammar are anything to go by.
Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
How do we know that people aren't paying reviewers to give good reviews
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We don't, and there are definitely cases of that as the post above shows. I generally ignore reiews from people who seem to review hundreds of books (where do they get the time to read them, for starters??). However, the longer the book stays around, the more likely it is that the reviews will include genuine ones. There's also the flip side -the books with poor reviews are the ones with honest reviews!