I bet you authors are getting all angry at me for the title. Don't worry, as far as your part of the work goes, you don't have to change your work ethics. Make your manuscript as good as you can make it.
There are some reason why a book doesn't have to be worked to perfection by the editor and subsequent fiddlers. Well, one main reason anyway, MONEY! (bet you didn't see that one coming)
Editing, copyediting and proofreading take time and with a tight schedule, there can come a time when the editor says "screw this, send it to the printer". Writers get nervous about their manuscript and would probably go on editing and tweaking forever if their editor didn't stop them. During the copyediting (in which the content is edited) stage this is what's supposed to be done. However, the work moves on to proofreading stage after the typesetting. This stage is to fix miskeyings etc NOT CONTENT. The author gets to look at the proofs and mark mistakes however, unless there is a huge mistake in the content (like placing one country on the wrong continent), this is it, you don't change anything but the typos. Sorry, move on.
So: copyediting = content change
proofreading = typo repair
Depending on what type of book it is and how much it's going to cost at the end, the proofreader might do a more or less intense job. This is why you sometimes come across typos and nasty spelling errors, bad punctuation, rotated letters etc. when you're reading a book. It's not that the proofreader is bad or that the author sucks. It's just that it was decided that the book didn't need that kind of quality and investment. It's not that it's a bad book. It's just, as a reader, you expect certain novels to be at certain price. Well, we gotta get it to be that price and still make a profit, we spend too much on it, we're going to pass that on to you, the customer.
Oh, here's a little something I don't think most authors know. Of course, when your book is being published, the money should go towards the author. However, at proofreading stage, there is a small percentage of costs that are allowed for the author to make changes to content, once that bit of money is spent, the author can be asked to pay for any additional costs due to their changes in the text. This is to curb the authors natural instinct to play with their work. At this point, you just have to trust that it's as good as you're going to make it (this time around anyway). Nothing sleazy about the practice.
6 years ago
3 comments:
This makes me wonder if I should keep writing or just go back to editing and proofreading.
I rather enjoy proofreading, to be honest.It's easier than writing (just have a look at all my unfinished, ashamed-to-claim-as-mine typescripts). Can get a bit mind-numbing though :)
I would rather say that books are NEVER perfect. It is always very scary when the first sample of a book I had in charge comes fresh from the printer. I don't usually want to open it, because I KNOW I WILL FIND SOMETHING I could have done better. It always happens :P
There are sooooo many things to take care of, that you'll need like a year to finish a perfect book. (I am usually aloted 2 to 3 months for a 144-156 page book. More than that and they begin to put pressure on you.)
Something to note is that while it would be ideal to make content corrections on the copy-editing stage, this is not always (if never) possible. It's because it is very different to read a book in text format than to read it with the final aestetics. When you read the last, clean, beautiful version you may find that something (the lenghts of titles, the names, some words, coherence with another book that is also in the process) should be changed. I don't know how else to put it, it's just a chemistry -chemistery- between the editor and the book, and some content details just arise on the proof reading stage. They do. I end up doing both tasks at both stages, actually.
Post a Comment