my first-ever Dear Publisher letter!
Jul. 13th, 2008 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauraanne_gilmanDear Major NY Publisher I Used to Work For:
If you are going to charge me $14 for a slight and obviously page-inflated trade paperback by a Name Author, there are a few things I have the right to expect. First and foremost is that you will have had someone - an editor, a copy-editor, a proofreader, an intern doing the slugging -- at some point actually READ THE BOOK.
I should not constantly be encountering "there" for "they're," "your" for "you're," sloppy and obvious tense changes, or having the narrator say they could only talk to a character during the hours of x to y because of it was too crowd-noisy, and then 20 pages later have the narrator say that he could only talk to that same character in that same location after J-where-J-is-before-X, because that's when the crowds left and it got quiet.
Because that? Is bullshit.
Nolove,
Your Former Employee.
P.S. I am very tempted to mark up the book and send it back to you with an invoice....
If you are going to charge me $14 for a slight and obviously page-inflated trade paperback by a Name Author, there are a few things I have the right to expect. First and foremost is that you will have had someone - an editor, a copy-editor, a proofreader, an intern doing the slugging -- at some point actually READ THE BOOK.
I should not constantly be encountering "there" for "they're," "your" for "you're," sloppy and obvious tense changes, or having the narrator say they could only talk to a character during the hours of x to y because of it was too crowd-noisy, and then 20 pages later have the narrator say that he could only talk to that same character in that same location after J-where-J-is-before-X, because that's when the crowds left and it got quiet.
Because that? Is bullshit.
Nolove,
Your Former Employee.
P.S. I am very tempted to mark up the book and send it back to you with an invoice....
