a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-01-31 04:11 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-01-31 04:11 pm
Entry tags:
Won't put you on the outside
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![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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