Editor
and publisher Mysti Berry’s latest project, Low
Down Dirty Vote Volume 2: Every Stolen Vote Is A Crime is out now and
features numerous members of the SMFS as well as other authors. Today in her
guest post, Mysti compares what often happens with fiction to her world of technical
writing.
Why Does That Happen? by Mysti Berry
When I was
a baby crime writer, literally following writers like Gigi Pandian, Juliet
Blackwell, and Sophie Littlefield around, absorbing everything I could from
them and from conferences and SinC or MWA meetings, I would often wonder “why
does that even happen?” Things like:
- A
manuscript turned in on time doesn’t launch for 12 or 18 months. What takes so
long?
- Typos
introduced into a manuscript, even at places in the text not ever touched by editors
or copyeditors. In my day job of software technical writing, content is written
once and published many places without alteration. So how do these typos
happen?
- Changes
from an author that get missed by the publisher.
- Errors
in the title for heaven’s sake!
- Editors
changing dialog for grammatical correctness.
Now that I’ve
published two short story collections, one containing 12 writers’ stories and
another containing 22, I can tell you—it’s a miracle any book makes print at
all. It’s an ugly, manual, error-prone process with poor quality controls at
every stage, despite everyone’s best attempts to be perfect and avoid error.
In other
words, book production is still more art than commerce, even at the big publishing
houses. And when the book is a collection of short stories, the opportunities
for error increase with every story added. I’d like to share a bit of what I’ve
learned after two charity anthologies about why things happen that really
shouldn’t.
Ancient and
Unintegrated Tools
As a
technical writer, I refused to take any job that used Word as the authoring
tool. It’s self-corrupting. Inconsistent. It’s based on a proprietary language,
which means it’s not really plain text, it’s garbage in there and it doesn’t
play well with others.
I’m used
to tools like a developer’s IDE and text that can travel from place to place
completely unaltered. Also, the look of the text is completely separated from
the content. You can be sure that if you push the button that says “make all
straight quotes and apostrophes into curly ones,” it’ll make that happen. Without
error. Not so with Word in my experience.
For
example, you may well email a perfect Word file to your editor or publisher,
but there is no guarantee what they open is exactly what you sent. There’s no
source control, just track changes—but if the underlying software occasionally
just randomly changes content, track changes won’t help you. If the author
accidentally makes changes with it turned off, there’s no way to discover that.
Track changes is the weak sister of source control tools that will tell you
about every single change: when it changed and who changed it. Track changes
just pretends to do that.
A
publisher receives your file, sends it through multiple rounds of reviews and
revisions between you, an editor, a copyeditor, and who-all else knows who. At
every transfer the likelihood of a small or large error is high. Without plain
text and real source control, you’ll never catch the little things that happen
every time a file is opened or closed. The only way to know how different your initial
manuscript is from the printed book is to compare it, by hand, letter by
letter. Nobody does that.
Now, I
could have used my technical writing tools to write my own manuscripts, but
then they would have been in formats no one else could read:
(WendyCodesStuff,
thank you for this example.) This system (git, markdown) is far more
error-proof than Word and its track changes.
Imagine a
world where, instead of everyone emailing easily corruptible files to each
other, you just sent a link: “Hey, world famous author, your galley is ready!” or
“Hey, fabulous editor of Big Five Publishing House, here are my edits,” and the
whole record of every single change is visible to all.
We should
have that world now, but we don’t. Instead, we have authors writing in
Scrivener or Vellum, exporting to Word (ubiquitous as it is untrustworthy),
maybe re-importing if you really have that kind of time, or giving up and
continuing on in Word, leaving directories of unfinished content, and, if you
are lucky, the final version in a hard-to-find email somewhere.
Almost nobody
uses a modern tool. (Some do! Ask Ray Daniel about “markdown” at the next writer’s
conference.) Nobody separates content from format sufficiently, and nobody does
adequate source control. I suspect that the learning curve for these tools is
so steep that you couldn’t both underpay people AND ask them to learn this kind
of stuff.
Here is a
list of problems that I found in my latest book, and fixed just in time:
- A
quotation mark disappeared from the beginning of a dialog line. The line was a
bit complicated, so the missing quote would have confused every reader at
first. I still don’t know how it got deleted, so I can’t fix my process to
prevent that error in future.
- Formats
were not applied to a single title page of 22 story title pages. The story was
shorter than the rest, and the software I was using required me to apply a
special font by hand to every title page (long story). I only noticed it
because that error produced another error farther down the production line.
- When
I saw a last-minute error (my own typo), I tried to fix it in the PDF before
sending out an ARC. Clicking into the block of text changed the font in the
whole paragraph, and there was no putting it back. (Yeah, I like Acrobat just
two chinchilla whiskers more than Word.)
- Because
there is no intelligent reuse in fiction publishing, I had one ISBN number on
the cover, and a different one in the copyright page. In technical writing, you
can create variables, place them wherever you want, and the right value shows
up in each place. Handy when you do something to offend the Amazon gods and you
have “republish” your book with a new ISBN before it was every really published
in the first place.
It’s nerve-wracking
to send a book out into the world with absolutely no way to verify 100% that
everything is right. It kills me. And there are definitely things I could do to
improve my process. But I’m a human being. I cannot be perfect, I can only
perfect my quality controls. And without proper tools, I can’t even do that.
Not
Following the Process
There is a
process for going from manuscript to published paperback:
- Writer
sends in manuscript.
- Editor
reads, marks up, send manuscript back for writer edits/acceptance.
- Writer
sends in that same file, with changes accepted, new changes highlighted with
change tracking.
- Editor
accepts all changes, hands the file off to the book production folks (which, in
my case, is just me with an extra cup of coffee and a swear jar).
If, as
often happens with the best and most creative writers, a brainstorm/sudden urge
occurs to review the work out of this cycle, errors can occur. The writer might
email a whole file with the new changes highlighted—but then the publisher has
to remember that the email exists, reconcile it with all other inflight-changes,
and not make a mistake doing so. I am fairly certain I let down two of my very
most favorite writers with mistakes like these—changes that they emailed me
about, but which I failed to implement. That kind of error keeps me up at
night.
The writer
wants their best work published. The editor and publisher do, too! But it is
very easy to miss any change that happens outside the regular cycle. When you
are working with a dozen or two authors, it might be a week between the time a
writer alerts the editor to a desired change and the time the editor or
production person sits down to work on the story—a week filled with so many fires
to put out or catastrophes to avoid that the editor straight up forgets.
Again, if the
editor is a more organized person than me, with more time, he or she could
double-check every email from every writer and never miss a thing, including
reconciling multiple copies of the same story with different changes in it (and
an email with “one more thing.”) However, this is still a hard thing to get
perfectly right every single time.
No,
Seriously. How Could You Mess Up the Title?
This one
is something I learned in technical writing, where there are lots of titles:
topic titles, heading titles, side-heads, all manner of special, short phrases
that help the reader orient to what they are about to read. Here’s the thing:
we glaze over titles first. We’ve seen them so many times, and we think we know
what they say, so we miss big mistakes sometimes. I learned somewhere that
people actually read in phrase-sized hunks, and we just see the whole hunk we
expect to see instead of the one that’s actually there.
My story
in AHMM last year was meant to be called “My Yorkshire Ripper.” Somewhere along
the line, and probably by my own hand, the “My” was dropped. I looked at that
title at least a dozen times from first submission to final approval. I never
noticed the “My” was gone. So now, that story is simply “Yorkshire
Ripper.”
Change
blindness like this can be fought with a robust checklist. Check the titles,
the author name, proper names, anything that should be capitalized, after every
round of changes. Or read your story backwards to find errors that are
otherwise hidden by your over-familiarity with the content. But know that the editors
and production folks have the same problem you have, and give them all a little
compassion. Being perfect in your day job is impossible, but these folks try to
be exactly that, perfect.
Why Does
It Take So Long?
As a technical
writer, I could write and publish about three pages of content a day. Most of
that time was spent writing, very little of it was lost to the mechanics of publishing.
So how can it take 18 months for a book to get to print? Basically, it’s a many-step
process and every step needs lead time. Unless you are publishing a hot
tell-all, you need to have a book close to complete a good six months before
the launch date. Reviewers need months to get a review into their queue. Marketing
events have long lead times. Authors need time to consider edits and complete
them. Most of this stuff can’t be done at the same time.
The first
publisher who uses modern writing tools and source control can cut this time in
half. Until then, just know that when your editor or publisher doesn’t speak to
you for months, they have not gone to Hawaii. They are scheduling like mad,
executing like crazy—and they really do care about you and your story. They
just have a lot of other people’s schedules to coordinate with.
Weird
Things with Dialog
This is
the one issue I do not have a fancy explanation for. I was horrified the first
time I heard about a copyeditor changing all the dialog of a character to make
it grammatically complete.
People don’t
talk the way they write. They do not always (or even often) speak in complete
sentences. Spoken language changes faster than written language because the
latter is weighed down by dictionaries and prescriptive grammarians. Spoken
language, on the other hand, lets its freak-flag fly. Great, character-specific
dialog is a gift to the reader in any story, and why any editor would touch it
is beyond me. If you have any insight into this mystery, please drop me a clue!
Summing
Up
Bad things
happen for good reasons, and it’s a shame. I recently bought a new writer’s
first story collection, excited to take the trip her wonderful voice was
guaranteed to send me on. But the editor had produced an error-ridden first
chapter—word substitutions that were clearly copy-edit foul ups, not the writer’s
word choice. It put me off the whole collection, despite my being a fan of this
writer. While it is tempting to assume someone along the way is not good at
their job, I strongly suspect this is simply one manifestation of people
working hard and fast with inadequate tools and change management. Easy to
describe, wicked difficult to fix.
I really
hope the publishing industry finds the incentives it needs to get a wee bit
more tech savvy, and change-control conscious. Every author deserves to be heard
with the story they wrote.
Mysti Berry ©2020
An active member of
MWA, Sisters in Crime, ITW, and the Public Safety Writers Association (PSWA),
Mysti has served on the board of her local MWA and Sisters in Crime chapters
(NorCal!) and on the board of the PSWA. She is once again polishing her
financial fraud murder mystery to keep up with real life changes in how people
steal millions of dollars without getting caught. She speaks at writers
conferences, teaches workshops, and tweets far too often for her own mental
health.
With an MFA in Writing from University of San
Francisco and a BA in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz, Mysti loves to talk with
people about story structure, language, film noir, and the resistance, not
always in that order. She was really fond of Dalwhinnie scotch until a Scotsman
told her it is a “lady’s whiskey.”
If you see her at a writer’s conference or
book festival, please do say hello.