2014 Netgalley/Edelweiss Reading Challenge

[Emily]

Have you ever logged on to Edelweiss or Netgalley with the intention of "Just Looking" and then logging off having requested 5 new titles even though your TBR is a mile long? Inspired by Netgalley November the 2014 Netgalley & Edelweiss Reading Challenge will (hopefully) give you the incentive to tackle your review books, stumble upon new ones, and get your Netgalley percentage to the desired 80%!

http://www.fallingforya.com/2013/12/2...

[Deborah]

Operating on the theory that many NetGalley readers are like me, i.e., regularly also agree on Goodreads to review books in exchange for free copies, I want to pose this question: How is that working out for you? I have discovered a few great authors that way (Michelle Scott, Ash Krafton, Samantha LaFantasie), but far more often I find myself spending hours reading books that I could tell, within the first few pages, were horribly written. As a general rule, these books also seem most often to be self-published and, as a consequence, are very poorly edited.

My husband asked me last night why I was wasting so much time on books I don't enjoy, when there are plenty of books on my TBR list that I want to read. The only response I could come up with was that I agreed with the author to do so, and I keep my word (although I have noticed other R4R reviewers who have not finished a book and openly said so in their reviews).

I'm thinking that in 2014, I'm only going to review through NetGalley, on the assumption that if a real publisher is publishing the book, it at least won't have grammatical errors in every other sentence. However, that idea is making me feel guilty because in the past, I have been a strong advocate for giving independent authors a chance. Thoughts?

[R.A.]

I'm a self published author and I hired an editor, yet I still have errors. My book was edited to the best of mine and my editor's ability. I don't think it makes a difference whether a book is self published or trad published. Editing is editing. I don't think it matters if a book is self published or trad published. It matters about the quality of the book. As I said, I hired an editor and if I had been trad published I sitll could've had erors.

[Deborah]

R.A., I didn't mean to be offensive toward self-published authors, but I do think that the quality of a book is affected by the quality of the editing and proofreading. When there are glaring errors which a simple spell-check or grammar-check run would have caught, I feel that is a sign that the author doesn't care about my reading experience.

I guess maybe what I'm most shocked by is that authors, like you, who have paid for editing services frequently are not getting what you're paying for. You are absolutely correct that errors can slip by even the best editors; one of the briefs I filed with the United States Supreme Court was proofed by at least half a dozen attorneys, paralegals, and legal secretaries, yet when I read it years later, I found a typographical error that we had all missed. I also agree that this problem can occur with traditional publishers, too; I recently alerted a major publishing house to errors I had found in my NetGalley ARC, and they ended up pulling the book back from the printer and pulping their existing stock. As a general rule, however, it seems to be more of an issue with self-published books.

I will always have more books on my TBR list than I can ever hope to read, so I'm struggling with how best to allocate my time. I don't really want to use the publisher (trad v. self) as a filter, which is why I posted my original question.