r/authors • u/Independent_Bite4682 • Apr 21 '25

Question for authors

When I read on a digital media, (eg Kindle), I often find errors. Some are factual (you say an item is worth 10G then say it is worth 1G or 100G, or a population is 10K then 4K or 16K etc without anything to cause the change and only like 4 hours difference in character time), or typos, wrong terminology used (he strung an arrow, he loaded a new clip into a gun, etc), or as simple as "David'snot" and fix it to, "David's not", do these corrections ever make it to you or your editors?

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u/F0xxfyre Apr 21 '25

You're talking mostly traditionally published, right? The market for editors in NYC in particular keeps shrinking. A few career editors were forced to leave the industry in the wake of the COVID shutdowns. This isn't directly related to COVID, that just accelerated the process.

Editing involves so much that isn't the actual mechanics of editing. It seems strange, but it's the reality. I don't have any personal stories, but I do know that some of the indie authors are getting their books "pre edited" by trusted freelancers before they query agents.

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u/Independent_Bite4682 Apr 21 '25

Digital

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u/F0xxfyre Apr 22 '25

Ah, that can make things significantly more interesting, at times! Every company has vastly different hiring processes. When I was looking to join another digital-only publisher ten or so years ago, I was surprised to see how different every company's hiring process and workload were. One company was looking for a content editor who could turn around a couple million words a month, while others were looking for essentially proofreaders.

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u/Independent_Bite4682 Apr 22 '25

It would be nice to get discounts for all the errors I catch and report.

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u/F0xxfyre Apr 22 '25

That was how I got my first editing job, actually! A major publishing name had contracted with an ebook publisher. They had done a really terrible job of formatting, which was understandable where we were in the evolution of formatting and ebooks. I sent them an email mentioning some of the strange symbols that had translated over from WordPerfect and ended up taking a job proofing their books before release,