Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Please, Elfwreck, see my blog post Give Me a Brake! Most, if not all, of the errors cited would have passed both spellcheck and grammarfix. Part of the problem is that authors do rely on spellcheck and grammarfix and assume if something passes those "tests" it is correct.
A professional editor cannot read a standard-size novel for grammar and spelling in 1 to 3 hours; perhaps an amateur, but certainly not a professional of any caliber. |
An editor can't read a manuscript in that time, but could skim through it, and potentially do a find-and-replace search for any of those errors that seem common. (Can't replace all instances of "no" with "know," but could search for "I no" or "we no" and replace those with "I know" and "we know.")
A quick 1-3 hour overview wouldn't fix all errors, but it could move a book from give-up-reading to occasional errors. Could potentially make it submittable to an agent or slushpile. Although I suspect that most books with grammar & spelling that bad, also have story continuity & characterization problems, some probably don't, but an agent isn't going to bother looking at any book whose first four pages make him wince.
:: ponders trying to convince would-be authors that they should pay $100 to have their book edited so that *maybe* an agent will consider it ::
Yeah, I think you've convinced me; the idea itself (publishers offering paid editing services) has some validity, but the practical side of it seems unworkable. The ones who would actually gain from it won't be convinced to use it, and the ones willing to pay for it are likely to have works that even good editing won't improve enough to make them worthwhile.
There are plenty of amateur books that would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing. There are a lot more that would need 6-10 hours to make them coherent & readable at all, and there'd be no way to making a pricing system that could tell those apart.