BTT: Pet Peeve

It's Thursday and Deb has posted another Booking Through Thursday prompt. This week, bloggers are asked:

What are your literary “pet peeves”?

With the flood of self-published [electronic] books, my pet peeve is now the lack of editing before a book is released. Now don't get me wrong, it's not just self-published books that suffer from this problem—I'm finding it in books from mainstream publishers as well. I'll use as an example a book that I recently read, Sketch Me If You Can by Sharon Pape, published by Berkeley Prime Crime and purchased as a Kindle edition from Amazon. On page 95, I read: She picked up the the thin scrap of plastic. It wasn't as soft and flexible as the kind of wrap sold by the role in grocery stores and used in homes all over the country to store leftovers. Yes, “role” when the correct word is “roll”. Spellcheckers can't do it all for you—some human needs to read the book and note the needed corrections. This is one of the most egregious errors I found in the book, but by no means the only one.

My complaint about poorly edited books is that each time I run into such an error, it breaks the flow of the story. At the very least, I'm annoyed. If it has happened too frequently, I become angry and indignant. Unfortunately, this sloppiness can totally ruin an otherwise wonderful book. Someone who is self-publishing has no one to blame but herself. An author whose books are distributed through a well-established publisher deserves better. And the publisher who failed the author deserves a smaller cut of the book's sales.

This prompt comes from Bookish Sarah who posed this question in response to a query from Deb in which her final question was, “What question have I NOT asked at BTT that you’d love me to ask?” Deb liked many of the questions that were shared with her and from time to time she asks the rest of us to respond to them. Like now.