Re: Demonstrating that PA lies about editing its books
Assume PA has 25 editorial employees. They've made that claim. They also once claimed 32 of them, but for now we'll go with 25.
Assume a 40-hour work week. Assume PA publishes 400 titles a month, which is pretty much what they do.
Twenty-five editorial employees, working full time, gives you 4,000 editorial work hours per month. That's ten hours per book.
Ten hours is not enough time to edit a book.
Furthermore, we've never heard of PA hiring employees purely as text processors; yet there's a fair amount of text processing that has to happen in order for an author's electronic file to be turned into formatted book pages.
First, you have to clean up the text: take out the double spaces, turn the double hyphens into proper em-dashes, make single and double quotes into their proper left-and-right versions, regularize whateverthehell the author's done with paragraph indents, and look out for one or two dozen other little problems of that caliber.
Second, you have to format the book. Chapter breaks have to actually break, with chapter sinks and formatted chapter heads. There has to be frontmatter: half-title, panel, title, copyright pages, in their proper format and order. You have to put running heads on the pages, usually title on the recto and author on the verso. Does PA handle excerpts as excerpts, footnotes as footnotes, et cetera? If so, those have to be seen to as well.
I can't imagine that PA is paying people to do more than one pass on a manuscript; and, as I mentioned earlier, we've never heard of them hiring people just to process and format text. I believe that the job done by the people they call editors is actually electronic manuscript cleanup, interior text formatting, frontmatter creation, and maybe a single-pass spellchecking. Ten hours per book would be just about what it takes to do a middlin' perfunctory version of the tasks I've just outlined.
If PA has the 32 editorial employees they claimed on one occasion, the time available per book comes out to 12 hours 48 minutes -- which is still not enough time to edit a book, and no great amount of time to clean up and format an electronic manuscript.
Why the foregoing is demonstrably overgenerous: Some of PA's available editorial hours have to be going into their perfunctory cover copy and press releases.
People who've looked into the question of whether PA edits, as they promise and claim, have in my opinion been distracted by the question of whether PA edits well. I think it's clear that they don't edit at all.