A question about Advance Uncorrected Proofs

[Martin]

I will try to remember to look for it when I get home tonight.

Hey Martin, where was that error in Buffalo Hunter? Since that one hasn't been announced officially yet I don't think it's in production yet, so we can probably get that one fixed. Thanks!

[Martin]

The error is in the last paragraph of page 110. Marty is referred to as Marry.

Hey Martin, where was that error in Buffalo Hunter? Since that one hasn't been announced officially yet I don't think it's in production yet, so we can probably get that one fixed. Thanks!

[Brian James Freeman]

In Burkes's Kin, twice in the openning section, the protagonist was haid to have shifted her eyes in a certain direction when she clearly only had one. In Little's The Mailman, Doug's wife Trish was identified as "Tritia" (I havn't read much of the book, so that may trun out to be the actual name or a pet name).

For The Mailman, that is how the name appeared in the original edition and it did seem odd to us so we asked Bentley to confirm that it was right and he confirmed it was, so... there you go.

As a reader, when you find a typo in the middle of the page and you think, "How could they miss that?!" what you're not seeing are the five other typos that were caught by proofreaders during production. What happens is, as a proofreader, you focus in on the error you have found -- you circle it, make your notes, etc -- and sometimes you then miss an error right next to it.

Some authors turn in nearly perfect copy and our production team loves them to death. But errors slip through on just about every book, unfortunately.

As Dan mentioned above, we go through several phases of proofreading to try to get everything as correct as we can. Some books have gone through 10 rounds of proofreading, using every proofreader we have, and the last person still found things that slipped through. You'd be surprised at how "rough" some of the manuscripts are when they arrive. One book that's in production right now arrived absolutely drowning in problems. Obviously a first draft that didn't even get a second read by the author. The copyeditor had to make 600 corrections on the 180 manuscript pages. That's insane. She wrote me when she was done and said, "Was he DRUNK when he wrote this?" The author is not anyone mentioned in this thread, by the way, and I won't ever share who it was.

To answer your original question, the relationship between the Uncorrected Proof and the final product varies from book to book. If we have to rush the ARCs so the reviewers will have time to review them, sometimes we have to use the very first designed file we have. Other times, when we have more time, it'll be closer to the final file or the final file itself. We don't change the wording because changes could happen all of the way to the bluelines, as Dan noted in his post.

We try VERY hard to find all of the typos in the 30+ books a year we publish but we harbor no illusions that it'll ever be completely perfect.

Hope this info is helpful!

Brian

[Brian James Freeman]

But his response made me think: who is a good writer? Is it really that prevalent? "Ok, you wrote a story, but now I need to go through it and make sure everything works." It seems odd to me that a person who writes for a living isn't in a position to know if it makes sense or not! I would hate that - "You wrote it, now I have to see if you wrote it correctly."

I think I actually touched on this a little in my response before I saw your post!

Some authors turn in amazing stories that need a lot of help in the typo/proofreading department.

Some authors turn in okay stories with few typos, but with a little help on the editing front ("what was this character's motivation"), the stories become very good.

Some authors turn in really well-written stories with few typos and little need of help in the story department.

It varies from author to author. Either way, our goal is to put together the best collectible, the best product, and the best edited text we can. Sometimes errors slip through, which always sucks and, trust me, I'm more annoyed than you when I find a mistake in a finished book of ours.

Brian

[Brian James Freeman]

By the way, I'm always looking for good proofreaders, but I will tell you upfront: I hear from someone nearly every week who says "I catch errors in everything I read!" who I send something to proofread and they don't find nearly enough of the mistakes. That's just because proofreading well is simply harder than most people think.

If you have the skills and want to give proofreading a try (or if you're already proofreading for someone else and are looking for more work), drop me a line via email and we can discuss it! My goal is to catch all of the errors we can, so another good reader will only make my job a little easier.

Brian

[Grant Wootton]

My favourite SK related error is in The Stand (both versions, Squire) where Stu and Tom are making their way back from Vegas to Boulder and are holed up in a deserted house (presumably thus since the plague) while Stu recuperates - Tom somehow manages to make a fresh sandwich for Stu (the soup, yep, can see that, but bread - seriously)

[Teriw]

I wonder how many PM's and emails Brian got after saying he was looking for proofreaders. Personally I find alot of mistakes in people's writing(including on here) but then there's stuff I wouldn't even know was wrong if I was looking right at it. Specially when its my own writing. lol.