McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

This is seriously ****ed up

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the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Shecky on March 02, 2009, 02:19:35 AM ---Yes. The betas do catch things like that. Yet they somehow get ignored in publishing.

--- End quote ---

Ive been kind of presuming that the betas' input is taken before the book goes through proofreads and copyedits, yes ?  It;s amazing the things that can sneak in there; particularly for publishers who are part of larger conglomerates who assign proofreaders globally and can easily give a piece of fiction in an unusual voice a copyeditor who thinks everything should read like a New York Times editorial... trainwreck ensues.

Shecky:

--- Quote from: neurovore on March 02, 2009, 06:45:23 PM ---Ive been kind of presuming that the betas' input is taken before the book goes through proofreads and copyedits, yes ?  It;s amazing the things that can sneak in there; particularly for publishers who are part of larger conglomerates who assign proofreaders globally and can easily give a piece of fiction in an unusual voice a copyeditor who thinks everything should read like a New York Times editorial... trainwreck ensues.

--- End quote ---

Correct. Sort of the first line of defense.

And agreed on the one-standard nonsense in major corporate editing; one thing that having a tight group of informal readers is that they've come to KNOW the tones, styles and other esoterica employed by the author for particular purposes, and everything read gets critiqued in that light. "Would X really say that?" is not an unusual commentary.

... but again, Jim's Johnny-on-the-spot about most mechanical aspects of his writing, so it's not a COMMON commentary. :)

LizW65:
Has Jim had betas from the get-go, or did they come into the game later on in the series?  I've sort of had the impression that the latter is true; I thought I read somewhere that he wrote the first three Dresden Files books on his own after taking a creative writing course and they were accepted by a publisher who was impressed by the fact that there already were three in the series...it was during this period that the Paula/Rachel error occurred and never got corrected.  Is this right?

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