[starrigger]

Originally Posted by ficbot

This attitude bothers me. If you view your writing as a hobby and an art, fine. But then, don't expect to earn a living at it. If you expect to earn a living at it because it's a business, then just like any other job, there will be vital things you must do which you may not like. I am a teacher, I am good at it and that is my job. I dislike playground duty, am not good at it, and resent spending time on it when I could be doing teaching stuff, but it's part of the job so I do it. Every job has things like this.

Well, shucks, why didn't somebody tell me writing was hard work and you have to do chores you don't like? Dang! I would have looked for another career!

News flash! All the writers I know proof things until they're blue in the face. And yet things still go wrong, and sometimes we can't do anything about it.

To reiterate one more time, everyone seems to think I am expecting authors to proof-read for formatting mistakes in multiple e-versions. I am not not. I am expecting authors to proofread for CONTENT mistakes in the actual story, like Jimmy being called Jimmie and things like this. That is a very different thing, and imho that IS the author's 'job' certainly if he is charging people money for the book.

Of course we proof for content. I never said we shouldn't. That said, it's the publisher's job to make sure that the content we give them is the same as the content that goes to press. We do our part, and they (usually) do their part.

If you're talking about someone self-publishing, that's a different story. Then they're writer and publisher.

On the other hand, if you're talking about a backlist title being OCR's and put into ebook form, there's an excellent chance that the writer was never even offered a chance to proof the scan. Or, that the writer made the reasonable assumption that the publisher would do his/her job and see to it that the newly published text was the same as the original text.

Really the only way to "properly" proof-read is to have the eBook and the original document side by side, and read them "in parallel", looking for discrepencies. It's very, very time-consuming, but if you want to do a first-rate job it's the only way.

That's exactly right, and I'm probably an idiot, because I'm doing that right now with the source text to my Alien Speedway novel, instead of leaving it to the publisher, because I'm a perfectionist fool. It is extremely time consuming, and from a business point of view, I probably should not be spending the time.

Sorry for getting testy. But you've got the most ebook-friendly authors in the business commenting here, so maybe lecturing us on what we should be doing isn't the most helpful approach. Most writers couldn't care less about the ebooks, because, as Charlie said, ebook sales suck. It's not yet a significant part of the business model. That's something I hope to see change.