Notes from a galley slave

[pbray]

I suck.

Eyeballs bleeding.

The only thing that makes this process worth it is the occasional bit that makes me think "Yes, that really worked." And the chance to catch typos before they become enshrined on the printed page.

Wish there were more good bits, but trust me, even the best of prose looks pretty crappy when you are staring at it word by word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark.

Comments

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

You're proofreading, I gather ;^). Proofreading is definitely one of the world's least pleasurable activities.

I've made it a practice never to look closely at any publication I've worked on after it's printed, because every time I do (sometimes I have to, to check usage in a back issue of a journal or similar) I immediately find half a dozen mistakes in the first page I look at...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Eeek! A half-dozen on a page would make me ill.

Readers assume that any mistake found is my fault. And, to be fair, some of these are mine, though usually I've corrected them at one point in the process and the correction never made it into the final printed book. Or, as has happened in the past, in the process of fixing one mistake, a new one crept in. I just try to catch as many as I can, and hope for the best.

I still get comments about the pre-production cover of one of my romances, which showed the book title as A MOST SUITABLE DUTCHESS. The mistake was fixed before the book went into print, but the cover image on Amazon and BN.COM is the marketing version, which, of course, has the typo.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, I'm exaggerating a little. And my pages probably have more text than your pages, since I work with 6×9, 7×10, and 8.5×11 scholarly journals set in 9- or 10-point type. But I learned very early on that there's no such thing as a perfect book; you could do twenty copy-editing passes and still not catch every error, so when you only have the time and budget for one pass...

Book reviewers (I edit a lot of book reviews) can be really scathing about typographical errors, although mostly they blame them on the copy editor or on the publisher (for not getting a better copy editor). What the people reading the reviews don't realize is that said reviews were equally (or even more) replete with typographical errors before the journal's copy editor had her way with them, so it's a bit of a pot/kettle scenario all round really.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I've seen some horrific examples in print. Books where the only possible explanation is that they printed the raw manuscript, without any input from a copyeditor or someone page proofing. Luckily that hasn't happened to me.

To make my life more fun, since these galleys are used for the bound arcs, everytime I catch a mistake, I wince knowing the reviewers got to see it as well.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Yes, I've seen books like that, too: back when the company I work for still had a printing plant, they used to take a lot of outside jobs, essentially self-publishing projects, and the results were usually pretty awful.

And yet, you'd be surprised how often authors (in my field of operations, anyway) get really offended because the copy editor corrected their grammar...