Here is the second ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the final part in days to come. The first part can be found here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl”...

I had thought that I wouldn’t find an e-book typo more hilarious than “the next Jew chapters” or “arroz con polio” from the Young Wizards series. But The Guardian Books blog has found what may very well be one of the greatest typos of all time, in Susan Andersen’s novel Baby, I’m Yours. The passage in question in the e-book was supposed to read, “He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shifted on the ground.” [emphasis mine] However, the accidental change of a “f” to a “t” (presumably in the OCR process;...

At one time in my career as an editor my function was crystal clear: everyone understood and agreed on the role a copyeditor played in the publishing business. But as the years have passed and the traditional publishing industry has consolidated into six megacorporations whose decisions are made based on bean counting, what was once clearcut has become fogged. (For an overview of the various editorial roles, see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor.) This was brought to mind the other day when I was contacted by a client to copyedit a new medical book. The client's inquiry included these points: has recommended...

I no sooner published On Words & eBooks: What Does It Take?, my last article lamenting authors ignoring the need for professional editing before offering their ebooks for sale to the reading public, when, lo and behold, along comes yet another glaring example of poor editing: Walker’s Revenge by Brad Chambers. Unlike some other ebooks, Chambers at least got the title right. Unfortunately, that is all he got right. Consider his description of the book — the text that is supposed to induce a reader to plunk down his or her $2.99, which will cause, if enough people plunk, Walker’s Revenge...

I mentioned earlier that Diane Duane in the process of rewriting her earlier Young Wizards novels to take into effect advances in technology that have occurred since they were first written. Duane has made a post to her blog going into more detail about the process, and the reasoning behind it. Naturally, when you're talking about a series as well-loved as Young Wizards, the idea of having it be revised and updated can give some fans a sinking sensation. There's a certain mentality of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and I think anybody can understand that. But...

Jason Boog of GalleyCat has taken a look at an essay by agent Andrew Wylie coming out in the new issue of WSJ Magazine. Wylie, Boog reports, is concerned about the quality issue in publishing, noting that even with all the self-publishing options available, editors and other quality controllers are an essential part of the process. Here’s an excerpt: “The devaluation of quality editing and writing is sad and it’s inevitable. Each house has a large number of titles to publish, and with a difficult economy, fewer people to handle the publications. But publishers need to...

Some e-books are published with plenty of errors, and others might have other reasons to be updated over time—especially non-fiction books in fields subject to new discoveries. And it would seem that e-books should be easily changeable at need, given their malleable, re-downloadable nature. But at present, none of the major commercial e-book vendors really supports much in the way of e-book change notifications. On his blog “A New Kind of Book,” Peter Meyers talks about this problem and offers suggestions for ways to fix it. He points out that Apple has a particularly good change notification and explanation...

I’ve talked about scan-induced typo problems in e-books before. For whatever reason, a lot of publishers don’t seem to have the manpower to devote to making sure their scanned e-books properly mirror the quality of their printed books. But they could take a lesson from on-line retailer Zappos, who determined that having higher-quality reviews of products on their site led to more sales of those products. So Zappos used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system of distributed low-cost labor to examine and edit five million reviews on their site, having the Turk workers correct spelling and grammar errors they found while...

Diane Duane has posted an update to her blog on the error correction issue with Young Wizards e-books. She contacted her editor, who contacted the digital editions department at her publisher, and she’s received a response from them that they have developed a new error-correction process that looks specifically for commonly-occurring OCR errors and eliminates them at the XML level (so that corrected e-books can be generated in multiple formats from the new source material.). They would like to run the books through this process. Then, Diane can go back through and look to see what errors still exist, which...

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Joshua Benton has a discussion of an issue I’ve often wondered about but never gotten around to expressing: If we use italics for titles of books, and “quotation marks” for titles of short stories, what do we use for electronic publications that are longer than short stories but not as long as books? Benton runs down some arguments for and against each method, and examines what the various style guides have to say on the matter. He leans toward quotation marks, but doesn’t really say where the line should be drawn—or even if...

Update: Diane Duane has written an interesting piece in response, that I will cover in full when I have time. I was going to bring this up in my review of the Nook Reader app, but realized that doing so would be putting the blame in the wrong place. When I was reading the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane on the Nook Reader, I ran into this particularly egregious typo in the first chapter of So You Want to Be a Wizard. “The reader is invited to examine the next Jew chapters…” And it was not the last. Characters might enjoy meals...

Here’s the tough question: Is there a future for freelance editors in the ebook Age? To which we can add this question: If there is, what kind of future will it be? There are few things that freelance editors can be certain of, but here are some of those few things: Every day our numbers increase as increasing numbers of people turn to freelance editing as either a full-time career or for a second income Every day colleagues, including those with years of experience, are trying to find in-house work and give up freelancing Every day there are fewer jobs available for a larger...