I am beginning to get really fed up with the lousy preparation that self-publishing authors seem to consider adequate for their ebooks.   Since acquiring my first ereader, I have made a point of reading ebooks by unknown authors as much as ebooks by established writers and whilst there have always been a fair number of typos in many of the ebooks I read, this seems to be getting worse and worse lately.

I am currently reading a Sci-Fi ebook from Amazon, called The Last Praetorian, by Mike Smith, which as a story is quite reasonable, but it is a mess… on every page there will be at least one, and frequently many typos and grammatical mistakes.  The use of “There” in place of “Their”, “To” instead of “Too”, “Fine Toothcomb” instead of “Fine-Tooth Comb” and many, many more.   Words are missing, tenses are incorrect, even entire paragraphs are repeated.   “Explicit” instead of “Implicit” and the list goes on and on.   The author of this ebook  is obviously a man with quite a broad vocabulary to judge by the words he chooses to use, which makes it all the stranger that he has seemingly written the book, and then published it without actually proof reading the thing.

It is this apparent lack of pride in their work which puzzles me the most about these error ridden ebooks.  If the author is verging on illiteracy, as some patently are, I can understand it, even if I find it hard to forgive, but when an author is capable of using words of more than one syllable and still puts a product onto the market that is riddled with such faults I find it hard to understand the reason.

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In a recent post on his always interesting blog, Rich Adin discusses the problems facing book editors in these days, and reaches no happy conclusions.

I have reposted his thoughts as I feel they are highly relevant to ebooks as well, and the whole problem we, as readers, face every time we buy an ebook, as they are so often almost unreadable owing to the lack of any proper editing before being published.

I know that in the days before ebooks, when almost all books were published by established publishers with a reputation to guard, there were also typos, grammatical gaffs and other problems, but they were relatively rare, but now with millions of ebooks being self-published, the problem has grown out of all proportion, and has become a real disaster.

As Rich points out, if publishers (and self-publishing authors) are not prepared to pay editors a reasonable fee for their essential work, we can only foresee a further decline in the quality of the ebooks we buy, a depressing prospect I find.

So, read what Rich, an editor of many years experience has to say on this topic.

The Business of Editing: Killing Me Softly

As ebooks steadily take over the book market, the question of whether it is better for an author to self-publish or go through the traditional route of working with an established publisher becomes more and more relevant.

Until about a year ago, all self-publishing really fell into the category of “vanity publishing”, by which I mean people publishing their own books at their own cost in very small quantities, most of which would be given away to friends and family, and then sink into the oblivion that most of them richly deserved.

Then came ereaders….

However, with the advent of ereaders and the massive uptake of these handy devices, this situation has changed, and more and more serious and talented writers are beginning to go on the self-publishing route.  This is now amazingly simple, and if you are too poor or too mean to spend any money on your ebook, it is free as well.   Just format it correctly for Amazon, or Smashwords, and post it and then sit back and hope that the money will flow in as people buy your masterpiece.

But not only talented writers……….

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A cry from the heart about typos in ebooks……..

I came across this open letter on a number of Blogs in the last few days and thought it might interest you too.

Sadly all too many of the ebooks we buy are a real mess of typos and grammatical mistakes, which takes away a lot of the pleasure from our reading, so this open letter struck a real chord with me.

Read on:

An open letter to publishers about the sale you lost today

By Joanna

Dear Publishers,

I want to start off by apologizing for the generic greeting; in spite of my best efforts to determine just who is actually responsible for the problem I’m having, nobody’s saying a word about whose job quality control of ebook editions actually is. I have asked authors when I have written to them about errors in their books. I have asked the president of Kobo himself, both in person and via email, to give me an email address, a contact number, a job title, anything. And everybody shrugs because it isn’t their problem; so I am addressing this generally in hopes that this letter goes as viral as it’s possible for  these things to go and somebody out there in publishing land will read it, and care.

Anyway, I want to explain to you about the $9.99 that you lost today. It involves a purchase I made in good faith this morning from that stalwart (and lone) Canadian ebook seller, Kobo Books. They will shortly be refunding me this money—learning from the past experience of at least four previous complaints of a similar nature, I submitted fairly substantial documentation along with my customer service query—but for now, let’s still call it a purchase so that you can understand what’s happened here.

The short version, publishers, is this—somebody at your company is running a PDF or Word file or whatever through some kind of meatgrinder converter, and then failing to give it a final proof before slapping a full, non-discountable retail price on it. And what’s arriving in customer’s hot little e-hands are shoddy books with basic errors that are just appalling. As a customer, it is completely unacceptable to me to pay full sticker price and get an inferior product. And I don’t just mean inferior in the ‘I can’t re-sell it like I can with paper and it’s crippled by DRM’ sense. I mean ‘inferior’ as in my teenaged brother could spend twenty minutes reading it and run out of fingers on which to count the really obvious mistakes.

Some examples from today’s book—and, remember, this was with half an hour of reading during my lunch break, I am barely through the introduction of the book here—

‘if sugar created an opioid effect, it would en- hance self-esteem.’
’92 percent of the graduates were sdii clean and sober’
‘I want you to sue- ceed on this plan.’ Read full story »

Vicki Tyley, author of three very good ebooks, gives her thoughts on the benefits of good editing before publishing an ebook: …

On Rich Adin’s always interesting and very varied blog (An American Editor), Vicki Tyley muses on her thoughts about editing ebooks, a subject that is dear to many of our hearts, as so many ebooks are totally appalling messes of typographical and grammatical mistakes, which takes away so much reading pleasure.  Something that I am happy to be able to report is absolutely not the case with her books, all of which I have read with great pleasure.   They are all available at Smashwords, and I can recommend them without reservation if you happen to enjoy detective novels with a difference…..  The most notable difference being that they are well written, by the way.

Anyhow, enough of me, here is what Vicki has to say on the subject of editing ebooks, words that should be read by all aspiring ebook authors before publishing their master-works.

But first a word from Rich Adin…..

Today’s guest article is by Australian author Vicki Tyley. Regular readers of An American Editor will recall my review of her mysteries in On Books: Murder Down Under. She has 3 books available and you can buy them at a significant discount until May 15, 2011 using the codes found in Worth Noting: A Gift from Down Under or in Worth Noting: A Gift From Down Under Redux.

The word is with Vicki:

The Editor: A Writer’s Fairy Godmother or Ogre?

The digital age opened the floodgates to all those writers who’d been trying for years to break through that almost impenetrable publishing wall.

No more “does not suit our current publishing programme.”

No more “we’re too overcommitted, and as a result, can’t take on any new projects.”

No more “sorry, not for us.”

Screech! Wait. What about quality control? Where once upon a time it was the role of the publishing house to hone and polish a manuscript until it gleamed, in the case of an Indie publication it now falls to the author to produce that high quality, marketable product.

Readers love the opportunity to sample fresh and new authors, books that cross genres, books from around the world. However, they (and I am one of them) expect those works to be up to the standard of mainstream books. Unfortunately, the complaint I hear most about self-published works is that many fall a long way short in the editing department.

In the Amazon Kindle store alone there are 750,000+ titles. That’s a lot of choice for a reader. So why then, I asked myself, would a writer not give his/her book a fighting chance and have it edited?

Initially, I thought that maybe it was the expense. For a writer struggling to make ends meet, the investment of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars can make the idea of employing an experienced editor out of reach. I soon discovered that whilst this does hold for some, it isn’t the major deterrent.

First, do writers even need editors? How essential are they in the publishing process? To answer that, we need to understand the editorial role and the different levels of editing services available. Read full story »