I missed SBD last week, so even though Beth hasn’t posted for this week, here it is.
I’m adding an epublisher to my list of epubs to avoid. It hurts, because there are several authors I like who publish via this company. It’s one that has been around for a while, comparatively speaking. But it’s publishing P2P fan fiction now. And its editing is just…not good, particularly in light of the extremely high prices it charges for books: $8.99 for an ebook the equivalent of a mass market paperback, which I’m leery enough about in paper, forget the transient nature of ebooks.
Despite my better judgment, over the weekend I bought a new release by an author I’ve enjoyed in past from this press. I should have known better on two counts. First, in this series by the author, the POV character talks in dialect with heinously bad grammar with the kind of incorrect verb conjugations of very common irregular and regular verbs that gives the impression (to me) that the character must have scraped through school by the skin of his teeth and had parents who placed no value on literacy. Yet that is clearly not the backstory created. Add in the dropped “g” for anything ending in “ing”, should of for should have, the misuse of me/I in plural nouns and objects, and it made my brain hurt. The cherry on top of the bad-editing sundae was the complete lack of direct address commas and random typos, and the misuse of commas following “but”, and I was highlighting all over the place.
The kicker is that the storytelling, once I got past the grammar, was good, and I like the characters.
But no. Finished with this press.
Shuffling through a book-less desert 
I’m trying to lure said author, I promise. Good editing would make all the difference in the world.
That would be wonderful! Good editing would make the books so much better – the bones are there! It frustrates me as I read because the storytelling is good, but the presentation is so distracting.
Hmm. I bet I can guess the publisher. 😀
I’m sure you can. It’s a comparatively old m/m epublisher, but more and more I wonder how/why….then realize because boneheads like me kept buying favorite authors who’d stuck with them. Done with that.
I’m guessing it’s the publisher who should spend more on editing and less on shiny cover art.
I didn’t think they spent much on cover art, given the Poser-ish (was that the old program?) look to them. Or was that sarcasm?
We might be talking about different publishers then…
MLR?
DSP. I can see MLR, too, though, esp from what I’ve been reading about editing on the latest James Buchanan book.
That’s the book I just finished. Liked the underlying story but the editing was TERRIBLE. Or nonexistent.
DSP is bad, too, but I’ve mostly given them up except for a couple auto-buy authors.
I am strangely uninspired to go read that book now. *sigh*
If you don’t mind punctuation abuse and serious overuse of dialect, it’s worth reading for the story and the Joe-Kabe dynamic.
Dialect drives me crazy to start with, and “serious overuse” of it?! I might throw my tablet. That would be bad.
No, no, no tablets thrown!
I’m picky about dialect use, and think it should be used sparingly to create character. It is constant for Joe. And his use of it is oddly inconsistent with that of the rest of the family, even with age range and profession taken into consideration. Other readers might not be as critical of it though.