Samuel R. Delany will be reading from his new novel and signing copies at St. Mark’s Books on Monday night. I sent the info to a friend, who wrote back that he’d gone to Amazon to buy the Kindle edition of the book and seen a review saying it was missing a chapter and contained a number of other small errors. Fortunately a devoted fan, Kevin Donaker-Ring, bought both the Kindle and the print editions and not only noticed the discrepancies but–with Delany’s permission–put a PDF of the missing chapter and a list of corrections on his website (which hosts a number of other errata pages for Delany’s works). Hopefully the publisher will get a corrected edition up on Amazon soon.
What, spill chick didn’t catch all of the typos? I’m shocked, just shocked.
Okay, a missing chapter is a major production issue that’s on the publisher’s head. But where were the copy editor and the proofer(s), that “a number of other small errors” got through? It’s their job to prevent that from happening. The copy editor should catch and correct–or at least query–errors, and the proofer should find what the CE might have missed. I say this as one who does both jobs. Never both on the same book, though, because that can indeed lead to errors not getting caught.
Makes me glad I bought the trade paperback. If it’s half as good as Mad Man, the book will be time well spent.
As the publisher of the book, let me point out that the so called missing chapter was a brand new, unedited chapter that the author asked to be inserted into a typeset book that was about to be released to the printer. Both the author and I knew this would not be included in the book, so no, it was not left out by mistake. Further some of the corrections posted on the site include word changes, not actual errors, that the author requested after pages had been typeset. While many were changed, some were not.