Quote:
Originally Posted by hilarity n. suze
I work for a publisher, and often, what I get are things like: "We're trying to keep the budget for this book down, so don't spend more than 10 hours on the edit." There are some books this works for, and some it doesn't.
I also do some freelance work. I would like to go totally freelance, but there is less and less demand as mistakes proliferate and people don't care.
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I'd like to disagree. There's plenty of work. Book publishers are not the only entities that hire freelance editors. Corporations, nonprofits, journals, individuals, government, educational institutions . . .
One of my best clients is a major NYC fiction publisher. They are glad to pay, and both project managers and authors keep asking for me to work on their books again and again. So let's not nail up that coffin just yet.
Folks need to remember, too, that just because you see an error doesn't mean OMG NOBODY CARES. Yes, editing budgets are being cut. But it's always been true that for every 1,000 things the editor catches, maybe one slips through. Or the proofreader erroneously changes it back. Or a prima donna author asks for a error to stand (if I had a nickel for every time . . . well, I'd have a lot of nickels). Or there's an error in the cover blurb that was quickly reviewed by a harried staffer. And we do a zillion other things besides catching errors of language and fact. We format files and insert typesetting codes/styles. We create tables of contents. We ensure continuity and consistency in figure captions, cross-references, table formats, list items, yada yada yada, keeping meticulous notes on EVERYTHING.
Some of it is damned tedious. I'm thinking of one of my current projects, a culinary textbook. Recipes can be a huge pain, because of the enormous number of individual items that must be made consistent. Units of measure, treatment of ingredients ("garlic clove" or "clove of garlic"? For "olive oil" in the ingredients list, is it also "olive oil" in the instructions, or just "oil"?), consistent phrasing of common instructions ("Using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, . . ."), and on and on and on.
I know that some of you know exactly what copyediting entails. But a lot of people labor under the misconception that it's rather like running spell-check, and we just read the thing tra-la-la looking for typos and blunders. If only.
We editors have to engage in a bit of doublethink. We strive for perfection, yet we know that when we get our copy of that "perfectly edited" book, we'll open it and what will we see first thing? A big fat error. And life goes on.
Speaking of editing, I must return to copyediting a rather thrilling sci-fi adventure . . .