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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.")
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So then the problem becomes "I know longer" and "we know longer". You can't do a global find and replace for homonyms -- curing one problem creates a companion problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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A quick overview wouldn't fix enough errors to move a book from give-up-reading to occasional errors. You can't readily catch mixed metaphors, convoluted sentences that include past, present, and future tenses, character changes (e.g., Jan at the beginning was female and 15 pages later is male), repeated sentences and paragraphs, and myriad other problems that exist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
:: 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.
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There is no book that "would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing." If you hire a professional editor to do no more than 2 hours of work on your 300-page manuscript, you have wasted your money and the editor's time. Six to 10 hours requires a reading rate of 50 to 30 pages an hour for that 300-page manuscript. Try doing a real edit, not a cursory edit, of a manuscript (not of an already edited book that has been published by a known publisher) at that rate and then go back over the same material at the rate of 5 pages an hour. You will be amazed at what you find that you missed -- and even at that rate you will still miss some things.
There also seems to be a misunderstanding of how a professional editor works. The PE doesn't just read the manuscript and correct misspellings and runon sentences; the PE tracks, for example, characters and action, which requires using a PE-created stylesheet. If you called a character Jaenski in chapter 1, the editor needs to track that so that the PE knows to change Jaensky in chapter 5. If you describe Jaenski as a multihued lizard with 16 vampirish fangs in chapter 3, the PE has to track this so that in chapter 10 your description of Jaenski as a green-yellow lizard with 10 fangs can be corrected. If you write that the war occurred 6 eons ago in chapter 2, the PE has to note that so that in chapter 16 a character doesn't talk about the war that occurred 7 eons ago.
The above are just a few examples of what a PE brings to the table. To track all these things takes time. It simply cannot be competently done in 6-10 hours.