Has anyone ever received a very poorly edited book from Netgalley?
Has anyone ever received a very poorly edited book from Netgalley?
21 Answers
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Loading Please wait
Has anyone ever received a very poorly edited book from Netgalley?
Yes
There are some real clunkers on there.
All the time.
I am fairly new to Netgalley and have only received a couple of books so far and this one was driving me nuts. The layout is all wrong, it looks like one giant page, hard to tell where one chapter ends and the other begins and sometimes the space bar wasn’t pressed in between words and it’ll look like 2-3 words are one giant made up one. 🙁
What is curious is the book already released so I hope they got that taken care of on the for purchase file.
One was so bad, it really affected my enjoyment of the book and my review was probably affected as well.
Yeah, it affected me review as well as I had to comment on how the mistakes and lay out drive me nuts lol
Yes. I’ve had some that were gibberish even. Like encrypted or something. I get them on Edelweiss too though. The last one I had for The Female Persuasion had many words separated by a hyphen like mov-ement or th-inking. Really threw me off.
Yes :0(
Yes, but they warn about that because the uploaded files for NetGalley are often unedited proofs. Even if the book has already been published by the time you got the copy from NetGalley, it’s most likely the file they originally uploaded.
Yes, I had a book where all the e’s were missing in all the words
??
Yes – and it will happen from time to time. It just takes me a bit longer to read that book
Yes, but it’s all part of reading ARCs. I’d say 99.9% of them are completely cleaned up before release day.
They are unedited proofs. Completely normal for the most part. I have had two that were unreadable.
It happens rarely for me, except the one I am reading now. I can overlook it because the story is so good.
Ebook producer here. It sounds like you’re conflating editing with ebook programming. Netgalleys are delivered in three ways: as a fully programmed ebook, meaning it will have contents, navigation, and you will be able to change the text size (if your reader allows that); as a PDF, meaning it will look like a print book page, and you can’t change the text size; or a conversion done in word or other program, meaning it’s a crapshoot.
The majority of netgalleys are from either uncopyedited, or lightly copyedited manuscripts. This is also true of ARCs and bound galleys. It would be wrong, as a reviewer, to comment on the programming or editorial mistakes of a pre-publication boundgalley/netgalley as part of a book review. You can request a copt of the finished book or ebook from publicity, or ask them to check your queries.
Thank you for this, I know everyone needs this info.
This is useful info. It turns out the book is unedited and not properly programmed. It was still a good story. It’s the first time I’ve seen that issue and I didn’t think that happened
How do they get so bad in the first place? Does the author submit them with misspelled words and bad punctuation or are they messed up during printing? I’m always confused by that.
The printer would have to open the file and introduce misspellings and grammatical errors for that it happen. They would have no reason to do that. Some authors are good at writing and not so good at spelling or grammar. Sometimes errors get introduced by an early edit when they try to clean up sentences. Sometimes there’s no time for cleanup before the galleys are printed. This is why copy editing is so important! Cop editors and proofreaders are the unsung heroes of publishing.
Copy editors rock! Gals! They are Advanced Reader Copies for reviews of the book, the story, not the editing, spelling, etc. It might be a good idea to do some research on why and where ARC’s come from. Critique of anything but the story is not part of reviewing an ARC. It’s a privilege and an honor to be able read and review for authors as reviews are so very important to the sales and publishers look at that quite a bit to offer further contracts, etc.
These are not “free” books, they are specifically used for the purpose to build excitement and reviews. ♡
Why are reviews so important?
Like Barbara Sissel said recently: “Reviews matter in how recognizable a book becomes. More reviews means it surfaces more often on Amazon’s “buy” pages. Reviews are absolutely critical to visibility and can make or break a book’s success. I am so grateful for every precious one. I also learn from them, too, even the difficult ones. So they’re critical and I’m appreciative of every reader willing to take the time. Long or short, they’re every one valuable.”
Carry on, reading friends.