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”...

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...

The short (somewhat obvious) answer, aside from errors introduced by OCR: because publishers cut corners by laying off proofreaders and copy editors, then rush the manuscripts out too quickly for their skeleton crews to catch gaffes. At least that's what one editor confessed to Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Another editor, however, says in the era of word processors authors have gotten lazier and stupider: "It is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are." Still, if you've...

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...

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...

Award-winning author Laura Ruby talks about the reissue of her out-of-print book, Lilly's Ghosts, as an ebook.  This required some editing and made her nervous.  From the posting at E is for Book: So, it was nerve-wracking to open the Word file of my OP middle-grade novel LILY’S GHOSTS in preparation for re-release as an ebook. I was tempted to put back my original ending and restore this or that scene. But, as I cleaned up the file, making various small edits here and there, I was happy to find that I didn’t want to revise, oh, everything. And I liked...

On her blog “Out of Ambit”, Diane Duane has written a post partly in response to my e-book quality rant of the other day, talking about her own experiences preparing new editions of some of her e-books. Duane had been using Smashwords to distribute her Middle Kingdoms series, and had no complaints. However, she found that if she wanted to do something about the territorial restrictions preventing most of the world from buying her Young Wizards books without violating her contract terms with the publishers (who own the US and Canada e-book rights), she was going to have...

Publishing Perspectives has a piece written by an established author who is taking her first experimental steps into the world of self-publishing. Alisa Valdez has written a number of books, including a two-book series called The Dirty Girls Social Club, both of which have proven to be half-million-sellers so far. Valdez’s fans and her publisher don’t see eye-to-eye on some matters. Her fans want more Dirty Girls, she says, but her publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is reluctant to commit to a series on something that doesn’t fit into an established serial genre like mysteries. After following...

I’ve mentioned that Wikipedia entries can be collected into bound books, thanks to Wikipedia’s partnership with a print-on-demand publisher. However, Read Write Web reports that boutique publisher James Bridle (whom we’ve mentioned a few times before for other reasons) has gone this idea one better: he has collected five years of the edit history of a Wikipedia entry into a rather handsome twelve volume set of hardcover books. The entry in question is “Iraq War”, and the reason Bridle did it was to point out that historiography is important. Because of Wikipedia’s change-tracking, he notes, we are able to...

We're going to try something new and I hope it will be a benefit to the community. If you have a job opening that is ebook or epublishing related let me know and I'll publish it here on Friday and Monday. Give me the details and your contact info and we'll get the word out. Let's start out with this one: David Allender at Scholastic is looking for a NYC-based kid's ebook editor/marketer. Contact him for details: DAllender (at) Scholastic.com...

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...

In today’s newspapers were articles about how the conservatives are gearing up to attack President Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. The grounds were the usual — too liberal, too activist, too outspoken, too quiet, too something. Similarly, the liberals were gearing up to defend. Role reversals from the Bush years. As the articles noted, a mainstay of conservative judicial thinking is a return to original intent. And that got me thinking — no, not about judicial appointments, well yes, about judicial appointments, but no, not for this article — about who I will vote for in the November elections,...