The Business of Writing > Publishers

Quality out the window--a mild rant

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MTH:
I am reading a book now, the publisher is a large British indie publisher, Corvus.

Anyhow, I have found some incredibly dubious grammar, like "He knew he had been being watched." I read that several times and never quite made sense out of it. Also there's this gem: "He was sat behind the table." The "was sat" construction has already appeared more than once in this book. Am I missing some change in the English language?

If I wasn't reading it on my Kindle I might have thrown the book across the room.

I can forgive one or two typos, or if someone self publishes, maybe they can't get enough people to proof read. But when I pay a decent price for a book from a company that says it's doing legitimate business and I get 300 pages of gibberish, I am not happy.
Mickey

MTH:
I think Corvus is an imprint of Atlantic, I have just noticed, which makes it a product of a rather large publisher in the UK...

Dave Freas:
I've noticed more typos, too.  I also noticed in several books I read recently several place where there should have been a new paragraph started and there wasn't.  Made following who said and did what difficult.  A couple times I had to go back and re-read the section before I caught what was wrong.

Could it be publishers are putting too much trust in computers to 'get it right' instead of using humans?

Dave

thomasdown92:
Not just in fiction books, even textbooks on business and marketing have so many grammatical errors these days. It is kinda annoying.

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