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Posts Tagged ‘Typos’

Gutterball

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

A common complaint aimed at self-published books is the lack of quality control, specifically in the proofreading and typesetting. I’ve not read enough self-published books to be able to definitively validate this complaint, but if you look at a page of new releases on Smashwords – any page – you’ll find at least one book with typos in the book description. Not just loose or minimalist grammar, but actual typos. Do you want to bet the purchase price on the quality of the manuscript? Neither do I.

Aim For Quality

Getting a book ready for sale is hard, and formatting for a particular eReader is a big part of that. The KindleGen tools Amazon provide are not intuitive, and it took me a long time to research the process online, learn the tricks and traps, and produce a product I was happy with. Even the Kindle Previewer application missed a bug in my HTML that didn’t show up until I tested it on an actual Kindle. It’s not easy, but I think it’s worth the effort, as the automated conversions available play towards the Kindle’s default formatting, and that doesn’t allow you the control you need to nail the layout. I don’t want first-line indents on the opening paragraph of each episode/scene, but the Kindle, by default, will add them, so I overrode them. The monospaced font is too big compared to the default font, so I manually overrode the font size for a script section, setting it -1 size relative to the current base font (and honouring the users’ right to adjust the size to their taste). Neat formatting touches are another way to add quality to the product – the kind of quality you’d expect from a “traditionally published” eBook. If you want to compete with the mainstream, you have to match the quality of their output. “Good enough” just isn’t, well, good enough.

Accept no Substitutes

I was so happy when I got my Kindle for my birthday; I’d been holding off buying/reading a list of books so I could fill it with content – traditionally published and self-published – and just dive in. In the first week I jumped between collections of short stories, novellas and non-fiction before finally choosing the first novel I woud read. I was about two pages in when I spotted the first typo; nothing major – just a missing opening quote. I shrugged it off and got back into the story. But not for long. A slow-burner, most pages were action/description until people started meeting up about 5% of the way in, so the errors weren’t as prevalent, but by the time the protagonists met and started to talk, I was counting five or six typos. Per page.

Large blocks of text were missing opening quotes, leaving you half way through a line before you realised the speaker had changed, and there were other typos – obvious formatting errors where letters had been replaced. Now, I know I’m not an average reader; I was a bit OCD about typos before I became obsessed about the quality of my own work and trained myself to hunt them down, but this would be distracting for any reader. Me? I was completely kicked out of the story, and didn’t know what the hell was going on. I persevered to 10%, but then called it a day. I was mad. I emailed Amazon support and asked for a refund and for them to scrub the book from my Kindle, and even though I was past the seven-day return window, they agreed. My argument was that the book was not of a saleable standard and that it should be removed from sale until a corrected version was available. They said they’d contacted the relevant party and had passed on my comments.

So, who was the DIY author who’s careless conversion so offended me?

It was…

Wait for it…

Not… an indie.

It was a book from a publishing house. A big publishing house. One of the biggest publishing houses.

And it wasn’t cheap.

Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter

I’m not going to say what the book was, firstly because I have a submission with the publisher in question right now, and secondly because it’s not the author’s fault – they had no part in the conversion – and they don’t deserve to lose any more sales (although, sharp-eyed friends on Goodreads may notice my to-read shelf is missing a book, but let’s keep it a secret between us).

I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. The print version of the book could never go out in this condition, and conversion is surely a case of reworking the final manuscript draft into HTML, so what had gone so wrong in the process? I’ve been working as a professional writer for a long time, and I’ve used most processes involved in getting text onto paper, so it didn’t take long to spot the clues and work it out. Example: on numerous occasions, “ll” was replaced with “U”. Kind of looks the same if you squint, right? Another example: “some_word?” was replaced with “some_wordY“. Again, you can see that the characters are in the same league, if not the same ballpark.

I’ve converted a lot of text, and I know that basic characters – the core alphabet – are never changed unless you overwrite them on purpose. Mathematical symbols, accented characters, even things like double-quotes and em-dashes can easily get nuked across devices, but you’re safe with “ll”. The only way those mistakes made it into the text were from OCR – Optical Character Recognition – the process whereby printed text is scanned into a computer, which then converts the graphical interpretation of the characters into editable text. Usually by guessing, as I’ve yet to see an OCR system that’s even 90% accurate. Yep – somebody mashed that book flat onto a scanner or photocopier and scanned every page into a computer. You know how else I know? The character substitutions aren’t consistent; it only happens some of the time. This, in addition to the fact that it was opening – not closing – quotes going missing, is a result of the person scanning the book not being able to get the pages flat due to the spine curve; the more the text curves into the gutter margins, the less accurate the scan, and therefore the OCR.

So what? Maybe this is a perfectly legitimate way to convert a print book to electronic format? Maybe the original digital manuscripts of this (very recent) book were lost? Maybe it’s cheaper to farm out conversion to a third-party using unskilled labour to manually scan-in the books? Maybe I’m just being naïve?

And maybe someone at the publisher should have got it proofread.

The Weakest Link

I’m mad as hell about this, as you can probably tell, given the length of this post. But I’m not mad as a reader/consumer (like I said, I got a refund). I’m mad as a DIY author-publisher. I need eBooks to be a success in order to maintain my distribution platform. Without eBooks, I can’t sell beyond the UK. Hell, beyond Greater Manchester is difficult. Publishers are fighting to maintain revenues on eBooks, while customers are pushing to reduce cover prices. Perceived value is everything in this intangible market; when text is all you’re selling, it has to be correct, even if the story sucks. Anyone selling poorly converted content is undermining that value perception – whether inadvertently or not – and is directly impacting eBook adoption.

So many people point to the self-published books “flooding” the eBook market as the weak link in the business model, but anyone, no matter how well-respected, can step into that role, and the more respected the source, the more damage is done.

 

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Posted in eBooks, Publishing, Typesetting | No Comments »

How To Be Cool

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

It’s not possible to be cool; it’s only possible to be thought of as cool.
That was something I worked out a long time ago, something that’s since flavoured my perception of all things deemed worthy of my limited attention. Being cool has nothing to do with writing, as authors are generally considered uncool, but it has everything to do with the subjectivity of brands. If you’re marketing your own book, you’re creating a brand: you. You have control over that brand through what you do and say, and what you do and don’t reveal about yourself. What you don’t have control over is how that brand is perceived.
Writers are a predominantly solitary breed, so a common approach to building a brand would be to plan, create, execute and then sit back, safe in the knowledge that you have created a good thing. The benefit of this isolationist stance is that you’ll never know if you were wrong. It could be that your brand is so finely crafted and astutely executed that you’ll perceived as the literary equivalent of Eric Clapton from the second your website goes live, in which case you should probably give up writing and go make six figures a year in advertising. Chances are, though, that you’re not making as good a first impression as you could, and the perception of your work suffers as a result.
So How Can I Be Cool?
I already told you – it’s not possible. It’s only possible to be thought of as cool, and in the absence of the powers to pull off the Jedi mind trick, there’s only one way to achieve the perception of coolness, and that’s to engage your readers in the development of your brand. Give them every opportunity to feed back on:
Your blog posts – good or bad? too long or too short? too tame or too sweary?
Your book cover and marketing materials – it took a 1cm drop of my book title to change the perceived message of my book, and I didn’t spot that – someone else did. It really is the little things. 1cm was all the difference between a contemporary slacker-thriller and a Clive Cussler knock-off.
Your social media – you might think that last Twitter update was biting satire, but there’s a fine line between satire and just being a cock.
No matter how long you’ve been working in solitude on writing the book, you have to let others get involved once you go public. I get the impression that too many indie authors are working in a vacuum (I can’t think of another way to explain some of the ridiculously high prices on Smashwords, coupled with typo-ridden synopses) and that’s not a good place to create a brand that’s going to have broad appeal.
Let’s go one further; how about letting others design your brand? I recently shot an author interview that will be online in a few weeks (volcano, ash, technology shipments, tedious story…) and my only role in designing the piece was to put the team together and show up with cake. The list of questions and the final edit are out of my hands, because that’s the only way I can produce something that shows me and my writing as perceived by others.
Will I come across as cool, and thus enhance my brand and the perceived value of my writing?
You tell me.

It’s not possible to be cool; it’s only possible to be thought of as cool.

That was something I worked out a long time ago, something that’s since flavoured my perception of all things deemed worthy of my limited attention. Being cool has nothing to do with writing, as authors are generally considered uncool, but it has everything to do with the subjectivity of brands. If you’re marketing your own book, you’re creating a brand: you. You have control over that brand through what you do and say, and what you do and don’t reveal about yourself. What you don’t have control over is how that brand is perceived.

Writers are a predominantly solitary breed, so a common approach to building a brand would be to plan, create, execute and then sit back, safe in the knowledge that you have created a good thing. The benefit of this isolationist stance is that you’ll never know if you were wrong. It could be that your brand is so finely crafted and astutely executed that you’ll perceived as the literary equivalent of Eric Clapton from the second your website goes live, in which case you should probably give up writing and go make six figures a year in advertising. Chances are, though, that you’re not making as good a first impression as you could, and the perception of your work suffers as a result.

So How Can I Be Cool?

I already told you – it’s not possible. It’s only possible to be thought of as cool, and in the absence of the powers to pull off the Jedi mind trick, there’s only one way to achieve the perception of coolness, and that’s to engage your readers in the development of your brand. Give them every opportunity to feed back on:

  • Your blog posts – good or bad? too long or too short? too tame or too sweary?
  • Your book cover and marketing materials – it took a 1cm drop of my book title to change the perceived message of my book, and I didn’t spot that – someone else did. It really is the little things. 1cm was all the difference between a contemporary slacker-thriller and a Clive Cussler knock-off.
  • Your social media – you might think that last Twitter update was biting satire, but there’s a fine line between satire and just being a cock.

No matter how long you’ve been working in solitude on writing the book, you have to let others get involved once you go public. I get the impression that too many indie authors are working in a vacuum (I can’t think of another way to explain some of the ridiculously high prices on Smashwords, coupled with typo-ridden synopses) and that’s not a good place to create a brand that’s going to have broad appeal.

Let’s go one further; how about letting others design your brand? I recently shot an author interview that will be online in a few weeks (volcano, ash, technology shipments, tedious story…) and my only role in designing the piece was to put the team together and show up with cake. The list of questions and the final edit are out of my hands, because that’s the only way I can produce something that shows me and my writing as perceived by others.

Will I come across as cool, and thus enhance my brand and the perceived value of my writing?

You tell me.

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Posted in Blogging, Opinion, Social Media | No Comments »

Letting Go

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Just a quick post after the monster that was Typesetting 101, but I wanted to capture this feeling while it’s fresh. I was skimming my print-submitted text to find a page to screen grab for that post, and I noticed a typo. And I freaked. Now, I know that this print run is small (110 copies) and that I can resubmit the files for the next run at a small charge but, man, did I feel bad. I felt bad because all of the people who have bought the book now have a “defective” copy, and they are the people who are supporting me now when I need it most. I felt bad because I pride myself on my attention to detail. I felt bad because my proofreaders (Mark and Julie) also pride themselves on the quality of their work, and I know they’d feel like they let me down.

Basically, I was freaking out and very pissed at myself.

Turns out it wasn’t a typo, and I’ve just been staring at this screen for so long I was seeing things. In my defence, the word “eighth” does look damned freakish if you stare at it long enough (never mind that my spellchecker would have caught it – thinking that was just adding to my sense of failure).

So, now that my heart has stopped hammering, I can reflect on the situation. I know there’s going to be at least one typo in the printed book. There has to be. I’ve seen them in traditionally published books, so I know that even professional teams of proofreaders miss things. The point of this post, and the question I want to ask is, at what point do you say “I’ve done everything I can to ensure I’m shipping a tested, quality product?” How much proofing is too much?

At what point can you let go?

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Posted in Publishing | 5 Comments »