- Joined
- Aug 8, 2006
- Messages
- 1,210
- Reaction score
- 320
- Location
- California
- Website
- www.blairkilpatrick.com
My mother recently told me about a book a friend had self-published. My mother said she was appalled at the typos and lack of proof-reading. (Both of these women are lively, well-educated-- and in their mid-80's, which makes it especially sad.)
I just visited my mom and she showed me her friend's book. Sure enough, it was put out by Authorhouse. An attempt at a pretty lively action/suspense novel dealing with current social issues--complete with sex and salty language. Have to admit I admired the spunk of a woman in her 80's writing like that! Certainly, some problems with overwriting, too many adverbs and adjectives, cliches, some unfortunate attempts to write in dialect. But honestly, I have seen much worse.
But the typos and mispellings were all over the place. Including some glaring ones, like errors in the "Auther's (sic) Note" at the end. ("Author" mispelled, punctuation problems.) The blurb on the back had the MC's name spelled two different ways.
The saddest thing of all was that the author had followed the "rule" for manuscript submission to a real publisher, and had written all the foreign words (there were many) in underlined script, rather than italics. The "publisher" left it as is, underlined. So it looked like someone's college term paper.
I suppose the defense of Authorhouse is that it's the "auther's" responsbility--but really, you'd think the place would have a little self respect!
Susan
I just visited my mom and she showed me her friend's book. Sure enough, it was put out by Authorhouse. An attempt at a pretty lively action/suspense novel dealing with current social issues--complete with sex and salty language. Have to admit I admired the spunk of a woman in her 80's writing like that! Certainly, some problems with overwriting, too many adverbs and adjectives, cliches, some unfortunate attempts to write in dialect. But honestly, I have seen much worse.
But the typos and mispellings were all over the place. Including some glaring ones, like errors in the "Auther's (sic) Note" at the end. ("Author" mispelled, punctuation problems.) The blurb on the back had the MC's name spelled two different ways.
The saddest thing of all was that the author had followed the "rule" for manuscript submission to a real publisher, and had written all the foreign words (there were many) in underlined script, rather than italics. The "publisher" left it as is, underlined. So it looked like someone's college term paper.
I suppose the defense of Authorhouse is that it's the "auther's" responsbility--but really, you'd think the place would have a little self respect!
Susan
