One last Bad Book note · 1:43pm Oct 12th, 2014
I told the recommending/pushing party what I thought of the work. It... did not go as badly as it could have, and let's mostly leave it at that. But she gave me one detail I'd had no way of knowing in advance, and I'm writing this from a state of deep stun.
That Amazon-published book cost the writer two thousand US dollars.
About five hundred of that paid for cover art. Visibly, weakly Photoshopped cover art. The other $1500 was for editing. You saw the description of the results. Fifteen hundred willingly paid out for effectively nothing, and the writer accepted what came back without question because the spellcheck had more or less worked. That much money just so someone could run a program on five cents of electricity and take all false credit, along with the overwhelming profit.
I want to cry.
That fifteen hundred totally could have been mine.
Ask about my rates!
Shit, 2k just to get something on Amazon? I make way more money sending short stories to bi-monthly sci-fi/horror magazines I find at the comic book store (most of the time but the rates are still shitty).
That hella sucks.
Well, now we know where all the money in publishing goes.
2527610
Emergency clear-up explanation: Amazon didn't charge him. He found people online offering editing and artwork services, for that value of 'service' also known as 'now roll the body over and check for jewelry'.
So if you ever wondered if anyone fell for that sort of clickbait ad, put a plus-one on the list.
A friend of mine was really into NaNoWriMo a few years back. He convinced me to try. I failed, but had fun on the journey. One of the info packets that went around was of a scam promising to publish people's work. The warning the NaNoWriMo people put out went something like, "Unless you are self publishing, a writer should never have to pay to have their work published."
$1,500 for "editing" as bad as you mentioned? Yikes! (Why do I get the feeling that "editing" was merely "file conversion.")
...Surely this wasn't just published on Amazon's own ebook self-publishing platform, then. It does NOT work that way. This was the old-fashioned vanity press scam, a straight-up fraud which "offers" book deals to unwary authors who couldn't be accepted by a traditional publisher in which the costs of production and advertising are born by the author rather than the publisher. They'll accept any manuscript because they make their money off the author, not from selling copies to readers, and so care not for quality.
Yog's Law: money flows towards the author, not away.
ETA: 2527619 gah, two minutes late.
Wow, that is just plain evil!
Well, instead of thinking little of them due to their writing, now I just feel sorry for them by being ripped off for the art and especially the editing.
Yea, which is one of the reasons why if I ever do get into writing non-pony stories, my editor will be somebody that I can find in the real world. And beat with a very large stick, as necessary. I maintain an Even Larger Stick for those reverse circumstances...
From what it sounds like, s/he should make sure to warn everybody to not use this editor.
2527619
Ouch!
Particularly when I edited good, for years, for free.
2527622
When it comes to self-publishing, Yog's Law has to be applied with care. It applies just fine when you have your author hat on, but when you have your publisher hat on (getting editing services, art done, etc) you have to expect to spend money.
Also, some of the best self-published covers can be derived from public domain art at a reasonable cost, which Sarah Hoyt has a wonderful article on.
2527839
Yeah. It's not a good way to make a living, but some of us would edit stuff for free just to be nice and a credit for editing would be icing on the cake. Of course, editing has a variety of meanings with the low end being human spell-checking and proofreading (good for detecting incorrect word usage).
Also, you 'edited good'?
2528469
I didn't care much for grammar, believing in "realistic speech". Something I cared much for, though, was content editing and story flow. Ever dropped a subplot 10 chapters ago? Ever wrote a story that was feeling too slow? Not sure how to describe a situation?
2528576
Sorry? Realistic speech? Smells like bs to me. Care to explain? I suppose you could emulate a manner of speaking for the sake of a a character or stereotype, but when you what is incomprehensibly because of poor grammar that's pointless and just bad.
2529398
Please google "realistic speech is unrealistic". It's not about stereotyping. It's the simple concept that real people don't actually speak as if they had a dictionary at hand, or had the time or mental agility to always find the perfect phrasing, so a character's speech pattern must be level with the character's background; furthermore, even a phD in English Literature will be rendered speechless or speak in broken sentences if pressured.
Besides, my initial grammarian anal retentiveness turned out to be a mayor turn off for many authors. I therefore made the rule to not care, telling authors that I would edit the bigger picture, but wouldn't do their English homework.
I stopped editing because I noticed that I had become a story slayer: between me listing the broken subplots, suggesting to add or delete scenes and replying in two to three days, authors would frequently release a couple of excellent chapters, then abandon the story.
2529499
They also don't generally speak in broken English with poor grammar the rest of the time unless they're lazy or haven't been taught proper English. It's okay to have moments of dialogue where the character is rendered speechless or finds it difficult to speak a straight, coherent sentence. What's not okay is for the narrator to be having grammar and spelling issues much less poor coherence and continuity to their story. In any case, not everybody needs to have a dictionary at hand to know the right words and some people do have that sort of mental agility.
Besides, as an author, you don't have to cave to every theoretical imperfection, you can decide that 8/10 times the character will have a perfect witty response to something.
I'm sorry that you were anal retentive about it, but an author who cares about their own work should generally be happy to get those things fixed. There's a point where the author ought to consider just handing it to someone else to fix those things so it's not an endless back and forth of the editor telling the author what to do to fix it.
I'm sorry, but I can't help but the see the last bit there as a two-sided problem. The author themselves is unwilling to go to the effort to complete the story. In and of itself, lack of author motivation is not your fault as an editor. Unfortunately not every fanfic writer is serious about writing complete, finished works. Some are only interested in the attention it gets them and if it becomes too much work to write a chapter and the attention gained is not sufficient they will quit. Anyone doing editing of the sort you describe probably ought to have a serious conversation with the author as to how far the author is prepared to take the story. If they only want help for the chapters they've done or the next three chapters they'll write that's fine, but asking someone else to sign on for the long haul and then ditching them is inconsiderate.