We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Since I’m in that weird world where I’m reading half YA books and half adult books … I am APPALLED at the level of editing in adult books. It’s dreadful. I don’t know why there’s a difference, but there is. Excluding POV and other less-tangible stuff, it’s unforgivable. A row of zeros? No!
Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician Trilogy is riddled with errors. I swear my novel has fewer typos, and that hasn’t been professionally edited.
In The Secret War, there were so many errors (including in speech formatting!) that it actually hindered my enjoyment of the book!
I often wonder if some of the issues occur during printing. The line of zeroes for example seems more like a copy error than an editing one. But who knows.
Ultimately I think the editor has to be taken to task. I’ve gotten enough unedited proofs to know that even the best writers make mistakes. I have a journalism degree but sometimes I make egregious errors and when I worked in newsprint everything went through the editor. It’s their job and they’re supposed to not only correct mistakes but be a sort of quality control for the company they work for. In the end poor editing makes everyone look bad.
I’ve worked on both sides of the editor’s desk long enough to know that (1) editing is more an art than a science, and above all about relationships. Some writers won’t “sit” for editing — and they tend to be the ones who most need the help. (2) an editor is only as good as the line editor. While the editor looks out for “big picture” stuff (not to mention securing the next best seller), the line editor/copyeditor and (to lesser degree) proofreader usually catch most of the details. If a lot of mistakes are getting through, something has broken down in the chain of command.
It isn’t reasonable to expect one person to move a product from concept and development to final galleys. A good book is (almost always) a team effort.
Very true Heidi. I was going to mention the copy editor…for some reason just focused on editor.
Does the copy editor see the final edition of the book before the writer? I’m wondering what the full process is. If you do happen to come back to my site, since you have experience, I would love it if you would give us a basic run down of the process.
Heidi
You are so right about certain people not having any part of the editing process. I can kind of understand because sometimes I felt like the editor was hacking apart my work. But over time it was useful because I came to understand what they were looking for. But newspaper isn’t the same as book publishing, so my knowledge there is nonexistent.