[a.k.a. The Call...]
I'm in the middle of going back over this book, ready to re-publish it and I'm irritated all over again by the 'copy-editor' that Joffe Books used!
I'm in the process of producing a 'core file' that will be the basis of the paperback version and the e-book version. It's an unformatted copy of the manuscript. The formatting is then added either in Word (for the paperback) or Kindle Create for the e-book version. But in order to have a core text, I've been comparing the 'final' version I sent back to Joffe Books, with the version they sent back for approval after their American 'copy-editor' had looked at it (the '' are because I'm not convinced she had any copy-editing qualifications).
She drove me up the wall then, and the comments she made then and what she did to the ms are driving me up the wall now! For a number of reasons, but primarily:
a) she didn't always use track changes
b) her grasp of vocabulary (and grammar) was limited
c) she introduced a whole load of errors and inconsistencies that my amazing editor (Gillian Holmes) and I had removed/sorted.
Not always tracking changes... really? I mean, that's bad enough, but she made changes that introduced grammatical errors! But, they weren't immediately obvious, because track changes was off (or she'd made the change and accepted it before sending the file back to me). I spotted most of them before Joffe published it, but as I'm going back through the ms now, I realise I didn't spot them all.
Her grasp of vocabulary... I'm not going to bore you with details of the kinds of things she didn't know, but if I wasn't sure of a word, I'd look it up in a dictionary, rather than 'correct' it to another (incorrect!) word. And if I did change something, I'd have track changes on so the other writer could see!
The errors/inconsistencies. Some of these were major. Some of them were trivial but very annoying (like, what happened to ellipses... Joffe style was to have them as: dot-non-breaking space-dot-non-breaking space-dot. No, I don't know why they couldn't just be the ellipses symbol, but, that was their house-style. Anyway, she changed some of the non-breaking spaces to regular spaces, but crucially, not all of them so that a find and replace now wouldn't find them all!).
As it turns out, most of these are not major issues, but only because I have a previous version of the ms - as it was before all these errors and horrors were introduced. If I hadn't got that, I'd be tearing my hair out. Anyway, it shouldn't be long before I have the paperback and e-book versions up on Amazon.
Keep you all posted!
I'm in the middle of going back over this book, ready to re-publish it and I'm irritated all over again by the 'copy-editor' that Joffe Books used!
I'm in the process of producing a 'core file' that will be the basis of the paperback version and the e-book version. It's an unformatted copy of the manuscript. The formatting is then added either in Word (for the paperback) or Kindle Create for the e-book version. But in order to have a core text, I've been comparing the 'final' version I sent back to Joffe Books, with the version they sent back for approval after their American 'copy-editor' had looked at it (the '' are because I'm not convinced she had any copy-editing qualifications).
She drove me up the wall then, and the comments she made then and what she did to the ms are driving me up the wall now! For a number of reasons, but primarily:
a) she didn't always use track changes
b) her grasp of vocabulary (and grammar) was limited
c) she introduced a whole load of errors and inconsistencies that my amazing editor (Gillian Holmes) and I had removed/sorted.
Not always tracking changes... really? I mean, that's bad enough, but she made changes that introduced grammatical errors! But, they weren't immediately obvious, because track changes was off (or she'd made the change and accepted it before sending the file back to me). I spotted most of them before Joffe published it, but as I'm going back through the ms now, I realise I didn't spot them all.
Her grasp of vocabulary... I'm not going to bore you with details of the kinds of things she didn't know, but if I wasn't sure of a word, I'd look it up in a dictionary, rather than 'correct' it to another (incorrect!) word. And if I did change something, I'd have track changes on so the other writer could see!
The errors/inconsistencies. Some of these were major. Some of them were trivial but very annoying (like, what happened to ellipses... Joffe style was to have them as: dot-non-breaking space-dot-non-breaking space-dot. No, I don't know why they couldn't just be the ellipses symbol, but, that was their house-style. Anyway, she changed some of the non-breaking spaces to regular spaces, but crucially, not all of them so that a find and replace now wouldn't find them all!).
As it turns out, most of these are not major issues, but only because I have a previous version of the ms - as it was before all these errors and horrors were introduced. If I hadn't got that, I'd be tearing my hair out. Anyway, it shouldn't be long before I have the paperback and e-book versions up on Amazon.
Keep you all posted!
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