Won't put you on the outside

[dolorosa_12]

I've been really sick for the past few days, and have essentially spent all of today in bed up until now. I'm exhausted, my bones ache, and all I really want to do is sleep. I've cancelled everything non-essential, but I could definitely have done without being sick right at this specific moment.

In better news, I received a late gift for fandomtrees after the fest closed: this fic based on Welsh folklore/mythology by kalloway. That was definitely a lovely and welcome surprise!

One fest closes, another is opening tomorrow: halfamoon, which is a fest focusing on female characters. The full list of prompts is already available.

once_upon_fic is now open for nominations, with details and the full schedule available in a recent post.

snowflake_challenge is doing its post-challenge friending meme. Click on the poster to join in:




It seems a waste to write a (rare) post on a Wednesday and not talk about my recent reading, which consists of a single book: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. This is in some ways the vampire novel of my dreams — when I'm seeking out stories about vampires, this is essentially exactly what I want. Our hero, Remy, is a vampire hunter in a world in which aristocratic families of vampire hunters coexist uneasily in alliances with aristocratic kingdoms of vampires, teaming up against the unspecified threat both of rogue, unaligned gangs of newly-turned vampires, and more established vampire kingdoms.

Remy's backstory piles on the angst — there's a cloud surrounding the circumstances of his birth (which killed his mother), his father treats him as a weapon to be wielded, the other vampire hunters either distrust or use him, etc, etc. Through an escalating series of dangerous circumstances, Remy ends up working with a powerful vampire couple, he ends up falling in love with both of them (and they with him), and a good time is had by all, against a backdrop of epic battles, political machinations, and huge heapings of angst. The worldbuilding is contradictory and at times nonsensical, but that doesn't really matter to me since the draw of the book is the characters and their relationships, which are very much my thing.

If that were all I had to say about the book, I would have given it an enthusiastic five-star rating and moved on (since I give that kind of rating on the basis of how well I think a book has achieved what it set out to achieve, rather than any objective scale of 'good quality literature'). However, it has serious problems on a copyediting level, to the extent that at times I wondered if it had even been professionally edited at all. This is a book professionally published by Hodder & Stoughton — hardly a dinky little small press — the sequel is coming out later this year, and yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.

This is not the first time I've noticed serious problems with editing (either on the level of copyediting/proofreading, or on the level of the actual structure and content of the book) in professionally published works of fiction, and I'm definitely not the only one to have raised it within my Dreamwidth circle. Without knowing the ins and outs of the publishing industry, my impression is of an industry cut to the bone, with the effects of these cuts and lack of resources starting to be felt in areas that are noticeable to the reader — namely, editing (or lack thereof). My assumption (and this is just a theory; I don't work in publishing) is that it is more cost effective to do book deals with a large number of authors (often with quite low advances), larger than the publisher has the capacity (both financially and in terms of staffing) to edit well, and get all those books out there and published. More books, bought cheaply from more authors, means the potential for more sales, and most readers of these books aren't going to notice or care about poor quality editorial work — and those of us who do have already bought the books, have already given our money, and aren't necessarily going to remember the typos and grammatical errors by the time we attempt to buy another book from the same author or publisher. As I say, just a theory, but whatever the cause, this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

Ugh, feel better soon!

It is a terrible shame about the way copyediting -- let alone structural editing -- has gone. I see that Hodder & Stoughton is a division of Hachette, and I wonder what the breakdown of "poor edits" is between Hachette and the bigger of the Big Five.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you for the well wishes.

You've noticed it too — the editorial problems? It's really dismal, and, if you look through the comments, nekarose, who works in UK publishing, has more details on the context, which — as long as the industry is under such financial strain — looks set to remain the same with regard to editing or lack thereof.

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, most definitely I've noticed it, especially in the last three or so years. Like you and Nekarose have said, a lack of copyediting is not necessarily a commentary on the author or the book, but part of the conditions of production in bookland. Even so, it's disheartening to see the way it does vary between imprints, publishers, and even authors, because it seems to me that this is a known problem, one that, rather than solving, just gets pushed to places and people the publishing powers that be care about less.

[corvidology]

I hope you feel better soon! ♥

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you.

[wearing_tearing]

Glad you liked Silver Under Nightfall! I also enjoyed it when I read it.

I do think you're at least partially right about the publishing industry. I've heard around some circles that certain big and popular authors rarely get edited since whatever they publish will make money. And small authors aren't given the same resources and/or time with editing as they should get because publishers aren't sure if the return will be "worth it".

[dolorosa_12]

I really enjoyed it, editing problems aside (which I've unfortunately learnt to expect in recently published fiction). Do you know the sequel is coming out in a few months?

What you say about publishing and editing resources makes a lot of (depressing) sense.

[wearing_tearing]

I do know! It was excited news, since when I first read Silver Under Nightfall I thought it was a standalone and was upset at all the unresolved plot threads.

[nerakrose]

I don't know anybody at Hodder, but it's an imprint of Hachette, and while Hachette is huge, imprints are typically accounted separately (sometimes imprints within imprints also are). so one imprint at Hachette might be doing amazingly and generating a lot of profit and another imprint might be middling, etc. so I don't have the scoop on H&S specifically, but finances/resources do play into it.

speaking generally, the industry has had a problem for a long time with poor salaries and overworked employees. within editorial there's a huge turnover of assistants who burn out after a year, maybe two, in the role and then leave the industry altogether unless they manage to get promoted (rare) or find a step-up job at a different publisher, where they still do most of the same work as they did before but on a slightly better salary. there has also been a shift towards putting the copy-editing and proofreading bits of work onto the assistants, who are - as you might guess - new to the industry and untrained, and by the time they have the experience to do a better job, they're burnt out and have left, and the cycle starts anew with a new assistant. the larger edits (e.g. structural) are often also passed down further in the 'food chain' to less experienced editors. picture an experienced commissioning editor who's been in the industry 12+ years - they commission the book from the author, but then delegate the bulk of the editorial work with the text to an assistant editor or junior editor who's been in the industry 3-5 years, and the copy/proof edits to the editorial assistant. those juniors, depending on publisher and imprint and how the work is structured, will often do very little of their own commissioning, but what they commission they don't get to pass down - they have to do those edits themselves so they are editing more books than they are commissioning. by the time they are in a position to be able to delegate the work they are, ironically, also the best person to actually do the edits as by this point they have (or should have) the experience to do it!

and that's not even getting into how some editors just aren't good editors, editing experience or no. having a good commercial sense and being able to commission the right books to commercial success is not the same as being a good editor.

the US and UK publishing industries are different in some ways and it's my impression that cuts, salaries, career progression, etc. are worse in the US than here. (it would be interesting to check whether the poor editing you're seeing is in US-originated books or UK books, or whether it's the same for both.) just to name one anecdotal example within my own company: I've been there 3 years this march, and have been promoted once, from assistant to coordinator. the assistant in the equivalent team in the US office, has been an assistant for 6 years now. in the time she has been an assistant, my team has had 5 assistants, who all got promoted or left for second step roles elsewhere (and in one notable exception, left the job because they got arrested for Crimes).

[dolorosa_12]

I was hoping you'd reply, so thank you for the detailed and comprehensive response. It's good to have it all laid out like that, and makes a lot of (depressing) sense. What you're describing seems like a mixture of (lack of) resources and the burnout that comes from asking people to do too much with those scarce resources — no wonder people are leaving the industry, or moving on from editorial work at exactly the point they have the skills to do it properly.

So I looked up the specific book (Silver Under Nightfall) to try to figure out if it was first published in the US or the UK. The US edition was published with Saga (imprint of S&S), and I assume the US rights were sold first, but I'm not 100 per cent sure. I will definitely look out for a pattern in the poorly edited books I read to see if they are UK editions of US-originated books, or UK books.

just to name one anecdotal example within my own company: I've been there 3 years this march, and have been promoted once, from assistant to coordinator. the assistant in the equivalent team in the US office, has been an assistant for 6 years now. in the time she has been an assistant, my team has had 5 assistants, who all got promoted or left for second step roles elsewhere

That is really stark, wow. (And I loved the mention of the person who got arrested for Crimes — I remember all that, that must have been such a bizarre thing to have been caught up in.)

[nerakrose]

(this comment may be more detailed than you want)

it can be really hard to tell where the book originated! sometimes the imprint page will say something like 'first published in the united states in [year]' or vice versa. if the book is published by the same company on both sides of the atlantic it's often (not always) a joint acquisition and published simultaneously, but there will be a 'main publisher'. (simplified explanation ahoy) say an editor in a UK department wants to commission a book and one key way to make the book work (that is to say to be able to offer enough money that the agent accepts their offer) is to also publish it in the USA, they will hit up a colleague in the USA and ask if they want to join the bid. if the US team like the book they will contribute to the advance. UK advances are generally low, so if the US boosts it that can sweep all other offers off the table. e.g. UK offers £20k advance, the US contribute another £40k for North American rights. the UK editor (or somebody else in their team) will edit the book and they will pass (sell) files to the US team, who may americanise them, but not otherwise edit the book. from the outside you will most likely not be able to tell where the book 'originated' or who the head editor is. you can check the acknowledgements in the back, but authors will usually thank both editorial teams equally (depressingly, the author might not even know who edited the book if it wasn't the commissioning editor). it works the same way the other way around.

it can actually be more challenging for a UK editor to get a US colleague on board than the other way around, because US publishing schedules are twice as long as UK schedules; in the UK a book can go from commission to bookstore in a year, but in the US it's usually at least 2 years, so their publishing schedules are usually locked down 2-3 years out. whereas in the UK (and Europe) publishing is more flexible and while they may have some titles on the schedule 2-3 years out, the programme will by no means be *full*. our 2024 schedule is full, but we are still commissioning for 2025. US publishers are, by and large, commissioning for 2026 now, their 2024 and 2025 schedules are full. and they HATE publishing later than the UK. they absolutely loathe it.

this is a longwinded way to say that very often a book that comes out in the UK today may have been acquired a year ago, and the same book was acquired *two* years ago by the US publisher. the UK book might be made using files from the US publisher and be anglicised, but is not otherwise edited. whether that publisher sold the rights to the UK or the agent did, or whether it was a joint acquisition, you usually just can't know as an outsider as this info usually isn't public. if you have access to trade news sources you can sometimes find out, but short of working for that company or the agency or knowing the people dealing with that specific book personally...

also the whole using files from the other publisher for the book is something that saves people a LOT of money and effort. the secondary publisher will usually buy the 2nd proof typeset files or final files if possible (the indesign file package) for a rate that's usually about £5 per page or equivalent in the US, and while that is a lot of money it's still cheaper than editing the whole thing however many times in-house if all you are doing is americanising or anglicising and then proofreading for typos and typesetting errors before going to print. so you lose out on editing the book better, but it costs less to make the book. and the kicker is the money you make selling the typeset files go into the box labelled 'file fees' and right into the publisher's pocket, with no royalties to author - because it's a set of files, not the rights to the book. pure profit. publishers LOVE selling files. please do buy our cover as well, it's great isn't it? that'll be £800 please and thank you, right into the 100% profit column on the budget.

[dolorosa_12]

That was really interesting, and definitely not too much detail! I had no idea that the US and UK departments were working together to acquire books like that, but it makes a lot of sense.

This may also explain why a recent Australian book that I read (in the UK edition) had anglicised spelling (Australian English for the most part uses UK spelling), but weird Americanisms in the vocabulary ('parking lot', 'elevator' and so on) — potentially the consequence of a poorly-done anglicisation of a book that was originally published and edited in the US.

[nerakrose]

it very well could be! my company has an Australian branch (well, ANZ since they publish in NZ as well, but they only have offices in Australia afaik) and I know we do joint acquisitions with them as well, so it's not just US-UK. I do get the impression that the US people forget about the ANZ people quite a lot since I don't see a lot of US-ANZ joint acquisitions or cooperation. in the UK office we work fairly close with the ANZ lot (zoom meetings can be a challenge timezone wise as I'm sure you're aware! the US lot at least are 'only' four hours behind us, but for ANZ meetings we usually compromise on both sides about getting up early/late. one memorable occasion we had an author meeting with somebody based in NZ iirc who had gotten up early, we stayed in the office late, and we could see the sun rise behind him. anyway, tangent). quite often the Australian editions are just the UK editions with a different ISBN and barcode, and sometimes not even then - depends on whether they're publishing the book on a 'distro' basis or as join acq. 'distro' is just the UK (or US) edition with no changes at all, though instead of physically importing the book to ANZ it'll be usually be printed locally.

(when we distro US titles in the UK we often, if not most of the time, print them locally. we had a bestseller like that last year and it was SO funny to see people on twitter who don't know anything complain about how this bestseller 'didn't even have a publisher in the UK' but was 'imported from the USA' and they posted photos of the jacket with the USD and CAD prices on it as 'proof'. and I was like, well. this book DOES have a publisher in the UK. the OG US publisher *is* the publisher, in the UK. the fact the jacket only has USD/CAD prices printed on it means nothing. we could have changed the jacket, but we'd then have to get proofs from the printer first, and why would we want to add that extra time to the printing process when we could use the tried and tested printing files we already had, and get the book onto shelves quicker? these same people would've complained about the book being sold out everywhere if we hadn't been able to print it locally, and so quickly.)

related to this it annoys me so much how the locked tomb books are distroed in the UK rather than published locally by pan macmillan, because it makes them more expensive on the consumer end. a friend at pan mac told me they'd been TRYING to buy the UK rights to the series from the US team so they could publish the series here (and, yes, make money from selling it themselves) but the US sales team was raking in the distro money so they didn't want to sell the UK rights, and so now we the readers are stuck with paying like 13 quid for a paperback because it's a fucking distro title. and then the paperback isn't even the standard b-format size so it doesn't fit into the shelf. fuck off, pan mac. like this is not a case of no UK publisher wanting to publish the books, which I'm sure many readers believe since it's imported! no! this is a territorial dispute between the US/UK branhces of the same company.

[dolorosa_12]

That was fascinating to read, and thank you for explaining in so much detail (I feel bad responding to such a detailed comment with such a short comment of my own)! A lot of things make sense after reading that (especially some of the offputtingly astronomical costs of Tor/Tor.com ebooks in the UK).

[nerakrose]

haha no worries, I know I can get wordy about these things :D English-language publishing can be so fascinating because the rights across different territories/markets can be SO different, and when you have different departments within the same company having to answer to different bosses with budgets and revenue etc it (in my opinion) usually only ends up looking really weird from the consumer POV.. I didn't even get into the issue of the 'open market'. 🫠

[trepkos]

Interesting ... I was recently told what a hard thing it is to get anything published or make a living at it.

[dolorosa_12]

It's extremely hard to make a living as an author, and it's a lot harder than it was even twenty or thirty years ago. Unless you're a literary awards darling/massive bestseller/someone they think has the potential to become a bestseller, getting a publishing deal will result in a very small advance that's not enough to live on (I've heard of authors being offered $10,000 US, which is split into three parts and paid out across multiple years). Most people who work full time as authors are either independently wealthy or have spouses with well-paying careers. Almost every other professional author has a day job (I know people who work as engineers, university lecturers, lawyers, in the public service, as librarians, etc etc — in order to make enough money to have comfortable lives, while writing in their spare time and being published professionally).

[vriddy]

Oh wow that book description was like "OMG FOR ME" until you mentioned the copy-editing issues... but I may give it a shot if I can find it anyway. It sounds too much up my alley :D

[dolorosa_12]

Honestly, I loved the book and just tried to pretend that I didn't see the glaring copyediting problems. But they are pretty glaring.

[vriddy]

My library has it so... I'm maxed out on holds once again but as soon as I pick up a new one this weekend, I'll reserve it :D And hope the story transports me enough I don't have to notice the typos. It must be such a disappointment for the author as well to see mistakes, after putting in so much effort.

[thawrecka]

I've definitely noticed more editing issues in what I read in recent years (which goes part of the way to explain why so much publishing advice to aspiring authors tells them to get their work professionally edited before they submit it anywhere, though if you're already paying out of your own pocket for editors I think you might as well self publish instead).

[dolorosa_12]

I've heard that advice, and I think it's appalling (although the reasons are understandable). So, professionally published authors are expected to do all the marketing and publicity for their books (via social media, blog tours, giveaways etc), they're meant to use their own money to commission art and merchandise to give away for preorder campaigns, and they're meant to use their own money to have the book professionally edited? At this point, what is the publisher even there for? I agree with you that it starts to make more financial sense to self-publish, although you need to be very good at marketing for that to be a success.

[lirazel]

I'm so sorry you were sick but glad you are feeling better now.

yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.

OH NO. That is the kind of mistake I just cannot stand. It might be enough to make me not read the book at all tbh.

this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.

Indeed. It's really tragic and I hate it.

[dolorosa_12]

I was thinking of you when I read the book, and made these complaints, since you are one of the first people I remember seeing pointing this out as a pattern. It's really unfortunate, as the book itself is good tropey fun, and it's not at all well served by such poor editing.

I'm so sorry you were sick but glad you are feeling better now.

Thank you.

[lirazel]

Yeah, once I started noticing it, it was everywhere, unfortunately.