Blame The Editor
Repeated from my “real-life” blog; as I consider merging the two because it just might make more sense.
Re-reading some books from my bloated collection of science fiction and fantasy, I spotted a variety of egregious typographical errors including inaccurate spelling, dropped punctuation, poor grammar, disordered headings and even the repetition of entire fragments of text – all amounting to what some editing books term mechanical distraction. They certainly distracted me from the story.
After putting a few offending books down, I began to wonder who was at fault for allowing such errata (the plural verb, not the noun) to make it into print. The author? Most readers will probably blame the author offhand, and having seen some spectacularly ungrammatical manuscripts during my career as an editor, I know there are plenty of authors whose grasp of the English language is a little…slippery. The printer? That’s a close second, but the printer is, in fact, almost completely innocent when it comes to typographical errors. Of the list above, the only one they might be slightly guilty of is text repetition.
Who else is in the line of fire? The publisher, of course – being the one who released the mistake-filled book in the first place. The bookshop, for retailing such a low-quality product? Maybe. But I wonder how many people will look right through the external layer of marketing and distribution, and pin the blame on the editor behind a desk in a back room of the publisher’s offices.
Having been an editor myself, I’m inclined to do the last. The editor, after all, is the person who selects a manuscript for publication in the first place – out of the dozens, hundreds or, for large and well-known publishing housese, thousands that cross his or her desk every week. If that manuscript happens to be totally devoid of any coherent plot or sensible information, the fault lies with the editor for doing a lousy job of picking it!
Even if the manuscript is complete garbage, once it’s chosen for publication it’s the editor’s responsibility to make sense out of it…or to give up and chuck it in the recycling bin where it belongs. And that includes cleaning up the narrative, making sure the facts are accurate and the plot has no potholes, correcting the spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and generally getting it into a fit state for public consumption. Nor does the editor’s job end there.
When a book is sent to print, a blueprint will come back to the editor for one final check, and that is when the editor is supposed to clean up any typesetting issues like repeated text or mismatched pagination. Granted, the novel that set me off in the first place was printed quite some years ago, at a time when it wasn’t worth the time or cost involved in making blueprint corrections for a trade paperback – but the editor should still have kept the errors to a minimum before the book ever went to the printer.
So I blame the editor for errata in my reading material, and while mine may be a minority viewpoint, I’m fairly certain that even if other people – like the author and the publisher – draw flak for the poor quality of what appears in print, the blame ends up trickling down to the editor in the end. If I received a mail from a reader complaining about multitudinous spelling errors in a book I’d written, my first reaction would be to call my editor and demand to know how all those errors got through. If I were in the customer service department of a big publishing house and got a similar complaint, I’d start a trail of inquiry which would also lead right back to the editor. And while, in the second case, the publisher will take the flak on the surface, I’m pretty sure that the editor who failed to exercise due diligence (term used liberally) will later find that his or her bonus has failed to arrive.
Editors sure get a tough deal, and they aren’t often recognized for it. Then again, who else can we really blame for problems in publications?
