The dubious joys of uncorrected proofs…

This salvo has been a long time coming. Given that I’ve been selling books (and reading proofs) for over a year now, I am consistently amazed by the accolades heaped on authors who (simply put) cannot write.

To explain: an uncorrected proof is usually a bound copy of the manuscript sent to the publishers by the author, and rushed off the presses in an attempt to gain positive word of mouth for a particular book/author. These often come with big assurances to booksellers about the planned marketing spend on the finished work. So far, so good.

I have read many wonderful proofs containing just the occasional typo (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Mistresses Daughter”, “Confessions of a Fallen Angel” etc…) where the authorial voice shines through in all its glory. It’s a joy, in these cases, to feel that you are getting in on something wonderful right at the start.

But then, there are the others. The rotten proofs, where the author can’t keep control of their characters (you read for a page and  a half before you can figure out which of the (way too large cast of) characters is speaking). And then you can’t remember for the life of you who they are in relation to anyone else in the book.  Or the ones that you wade through like you’ve been condemned to a hell of homophone calls, weird synonyms, and sentences that don’t go anywhere. To make matters worse, sometimes things are so mangled that you can’t even guess at what the word the author meant to use was.

Now, looking back over my nano-novel I can see how easy it is to misspell, or mistype, something when you’re writing at speed (my own most common mistake is to leave a letter out when the last letter of the preceding word is the same as the first of the next “almos there” for example) but to submit something as riddled with clunkiness and errors to a publisher, knowing that it’s going to be bound and sent off for a wodge of the book-selling community to read?? Methinks not.

Some of the stuff we get is like a sub-par first draft for something that could be interesting if a proper writer wrote it. The plot is there, but the writing is not.

And the worst part? Some of these are by best-selling, highly-praised writers.

There are best-sellers sitting in our proofs basket untouched, because none of us want to read them, having already been burned by mangled prose and half-assed first drafts. And when someone does dive in after a proof of something that’s flying off the shelves, their disappointment at the original puts them off hand-selling the finished work.

All hail the editor, they who make the unreadable mess into a polished end-product.

And pity the poor bookseller who gets to read work uncorrected by these unsung heroes.