lauraanne_gilman: (please)
lauraanne_gilman ([personal profile] lauraanne_gilman) wrote2008-07-13 06:50 pm
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my first-ever Dear Publisher letter!

Dear 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....