Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

This came at a perfect time for me - Navarro’s Promise is on my list to buy, but after hearing all of this, I’ll request the crappy hard copy from my library and MAYBE buy the corrected copy (either hard copy or Kindle) when (if?) the errors are fixed.  I got laid off in March, so spending any money is a big deal for me - and it kills me to not spend money on books. A t-shirt I saw sums my book buying habits up perfectly - “oops, I accidentally bought another pile of books!”

terms93 - From the sounds of it, there are more than 93 terms that are wrong in Navarro’s Promise

I wouldn’t return the paper book or the ebook. It’s not that big of a deal to me for one book to have a mistake. It’d be nice to get a coupon for the next book, a refund or a replacement book but it’s not a deal-breaker if that doesn’t happen.

If the same mistakes happened in a second book by the same author- then I would most likely stop reading that author and move on.

Oddly enough I’m more forgiving in regards to errors with print books as opposed to the digital variety. Digital screams “write a program that will take care of this if you can’t be buggered” while print I imagine some overworked bookish human chained to a desk while wearing a smoking jacket. Because everyone who reads a lot wears smoking jackets- cigarettes not required. I tend to give them more leeway than people who are working with data on a computer system.

I personally believe this is because I feel that I pay too much for digital versions of paper books. Since I’m paying an exorbitant amount, the quality better be good enough to make me slap a donkey and call it mama. When it’s not- I remember the printing house, where I bought it, who it was written by and how much I paid for it. It’s automatic, I don’t even have to work to memorize it.

Still, it takes more than one mistake-laden book before I walk away. Two though? That’s enough of that.

Well, I guess Leigh can’t do anything about the print copies unless/until the book goes into a second printing.  Once those big presses roll whatever comes out is the book that you get.  BUT, the digital copy CAN and SHOULD be changed—typos corrected and scene added back.  The missing scene(s) should be posted online for the print readers.  From the posting I would guess that Lora Leigh (could that be a real name??) is either a bad typist or a bad speller or both.  Certainly there doesn’t seem to be much pride in the book by either the author or the publisher. 

Do I sound negative? YES, and I’m a fan.  I’ll follow Jenn’s lead and ask for the book at my library.  Maybe only a drop in sales will get the attention of Lora Leigh and her publisher.  And I’ll seriously consider not even asking for her next book at the library.  The series seems to be winding down a little anyway and I think I’ll drop it from my mental “look for” list.

It seems Lora Leigh’s fans are loving and forgiving.  The reviews indicate clearly that this is not just a Kindle problem, that it is evident in the printed version.  I have occasionally purchased paper books, even hard covered, where a chapter will be upside down or repeated or missing.  For this to be such a general problem, it has to be the publisher.  Self-published Kindle versions can be edited and re-edited in situ.

Actually, one of my favourite authors released his book with all of the footnotes missing, and due to the content of the book, this made nearly a whole chapter almost completely nonsensical, and a lot of the rest of it was off. His solution was pretty prompt though. He released a note of apology and pages of stickers so you could stick them on in there. Or you could trade in for the fixed version when it was ready.

So, I guess how the author responds is an important deciding factor for me. Completely ignoring the problem and only leaving one little apology buried somewhere, while the sellers of the book make up excuses? That really does strike me as complete lack of caring, and depending on how invested in the story I was, might only take one time to end up on my NO WAY list. But if the mistake is handled properly, or at least with good humour, it would have to happen quite a lot to really bother me.

I haven’t quite recovered from the recession, so I don’t have the money to waste on things that I won’t enjoy.  Realistically, I know know you can’t expect you’ll love everything, but I know what will drive me nuts, so I try to avoid it.  I’m on the nitpicky side, and I find typos and continuity errors extremely jarring and distracting to my enjoyment of a book, so I’d return it, with a follow-up letter or email to the publisher or retailer to explain why.  I would likely come back to the book at a later (i.e. corrected) edition, and I wouldn’t cross the author off my list immediately; however, if it happened again, I’d probably stop buying that author.  If the publisher or editor or even the author can’t be arsed to do quality control, I don’t know why I should reward them for that lack of effort.

expected43 - who would have expected 43 errors in the first chapter alone?

The fact that the book made it through editing into both print & Kindle with a missing section is really bad. I don’t read Leigh, so I don;t have to be concerned about this book. However, the publisher is also partially responsible so this makes me a little wary of Berkley in general WRT to quality control.

I’m confused by the complaints about the poor grammar and bad spelling though. Are they worse in this book than in Leigh’s previous work? Because one of (several) reasons I that stopped reading her is that she can’t spell and apparently also can’t operate spell check and her grammar is atrocious. If someone expects to be paid for her writing I expect her to either do better than that or make sure she has good proof readers and editors.

Wow. Just. Wow.
I read a LOT. Very few books, if any, have been free of spelling, punctuation, grammar, or content errors. I read a Kleypas book that was the 10th printed version, and it STILL had errors. Really?!
For a cock up of this magnitude, either there was no copy editor, or the copy editor just suck at his/her job. I would be getting my money back. I’d give the author another chance on their next release, but then I’m out if that sort of thing (massive cluster) happens again. And more wary of the publisher.
Every time I see an error, I’m tempted to check the job listings at the publisher’s website and see if they’re hiring copy editors and/or email them and tell them I’d be willing to copy edit for books. But then I remember that Kleypas book and realize they must not care about putting out an error-free product, just a product.

I had the experience of reading one perfectly well-formatted paper book I liked, then buying Kindle editions of other series books with awful e-formatting errors. I put in a review at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/ANRFMVRXUZPSX/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp) might link you to it. 

Got it so far?  Nothing wrong with print version but big block to reading because of e-version format errors.

Now the end, for now.  A couple weeks ago Amazon/Kindle folk emailed me to say that they saw my complaint and now had an e-version of the book with e-format errors corrected.  Amazon, at least in this case, did take steps to fix the problem and then gave me the new improved version of the book.

*Sigh* because I had struggled through the visual challenge with the bad format and that series is done for me. It is good to know that if or when I am in the mood to reread it the version I retrieve from the archives will be readable.

Oh:  items was “Catch of a Lifetime” from Mermaid series by Judi Fennell.  Made the mistake of getting remaining three in series in e-format all at once after the print book lightened my mood.  All of the e-books had the same format error.  What can I say, fun and lite romance.

I’ve also stopped purchasing Leigh’s books, for the reasons mentioned by the reader from Ireland. Leigh was an autobuy for me, but after finding numerous editing issues in her recent releases and reading the complaints about this book on the reviews on Amazon, I decided not to buy it.

“Generaly WTFery” pretty much describes every single Lora Leigh book I’ve ever read. I think she has really excellent ideas, but doesn’t know how to write well. Or maybe she just needs to take her time…she’s written a LOT of books.

The only thing that would make me return a book is missing scenes. I’m too lazy to bother with anything else unless there are errors in every other sentence.

How many books before I give up depends on the author. Someone like, say,  Nalini Singh (who’s digital books (don’t know about print) actually have quite a few typos and things like repeated sentences, not enough to make them unreadable, but definitely noticeable) will have to make some pretty huge errors back-to-back for me to stop reading her. A new-to-me author or one I take or leave will get no more than 2 strikes with me.

If this happened to me, I’d send the book back and ask for a refund. And I wouldn’t buy from that author again. In fact, I’d be reluctant to buy from the publisher ever again. I’d give the publisher, with a different author, one more chance, and if it happened in a different author’s book, I’d write to the publisher and explain that they’d lost a customer because they were too cheap to hire a copy-editor or a proofreader.

As someone who works in publishing, I understand that errors happen. Files get mixed up, the printer screws something up, an image gets reversed, a name gets misspelled. Books are made by humans, and even the best copyeditors and proofreaders can’t catch every single mistake.

That said, if the there are *consistent* errors throughout a book - or even worse, throughout a series of books - then that points to more serious problems with the author and publisher both. Manuscripts generally go through several rounds of editing and proofing, and for a book to have this many flaws, it sounds like that process has been heavily simplified or skipped altogether. It’s all well and good to want to save money on the editorial process, but there’s no excuse for putting out a product that reflects so poorly on both the author and the publisher. And the publisher can’t expect that readers will willingly pay good money for a substandard product.

And, as an author, if your publisher is cutting back on intensive editing and just supplying proofing (although even that seems to have been skipped here?), then it’s on you to make sure that your writing is properly represented to the world. If you know that you have a history of spelling/typing errors, hire a copyeditor. If you can’t go to that expense, at the very least run spell check and have a friend look over your work. Even someone who’s not a specialist should be able to spot most of these errors - I presume, for instance, that not everyone on this site spends their days editing, and yet plenty of people have noticed these errors.

Now, admittedly, I am a copyeditor, and so I notice this stuff in books all the time. But I’m capable of reading over the odd missed comma or misspelled word - like I said, we’re human and mistakes happen. But a book full of errors like this? I’d probably not make it all the way through. And while I wouldn’t return it, because I’m lazy, I would definitely throw it on the pile of books to be sold to the used book store, and probably wouldn’t read a book by the same author/from the same press. Like everyone else these days, I don’t have a lot of spare cash and I have to rationalize every dollar I spend on books; why spend it on an obviously flawed product from a company that apparently doesn’t give a damn about quality?

I’ve never gotten a book with as many errors as I’ve read this one has, although, if I had, I would definitely want the book corrected and I’d want a corrected copy. I suppose I might also accept just returning the book and getting my money back, but that would taste really bitter if it was something I’d been waiting for for a while. The bitter feeling would probably still be there, even if I got a corrected copy, and I’d be super-suspicious of any future books. Whether I’d consider it a bigger blow to the author’s reputation or to the publisher’s would, I guess, depend upon if I heard of any other problems. However flawed this thinking might be, with print books I think I’d be more cautious about the author, while with e-books I’d be more cautious about both the author AND the publisher. I seem to be more publisher-conscious with e-books than print books, for some reason.

Some of the books I’ve read have had a few typos. That happens, and there are usually such a small number of them that I can overlook them. Missing pages would be a HUGE issue for me, although it sounds like this book had more issues than just a few missing pages.

In this particular case, yes, I’d ask for my money back. It’s something I never do normally.  But this book is a bad “product” rather than dealing with something I don’t personally like.
As an example, I dislike books where children play a big part, which is why I tend to avoid the Superromance line. Definitely something I wouldn’t complain about, because it’s a matter of opinion, and personal choice.

But where the product is wrong, ie multiple typos, grammar errors and errors in logical story progression, then yes, I’d send it back.

Dealing with it - surely a refund or a replacement with a corrected copy is the only response? The analogy with the bread is spot on, IMO.

I had one print book a couple of years back that sat in my TBR pile for {ahem} months (years?) before I started reading it. There was a huge printing error in the middle where like 50 pages were replaced by 50 pages from later in the book (page numbers and all). The repeated scene was just repeated exactly as printed later on and the missing pages were just missing. But it had been so long since I bought it that I didn’t feel comfortable just calling up and asking for a refund. I never finished it either. So, win for the publisher, loss for me.

I have never read the author discussed here, but I was surprised that the publisher was a known one. I was expecting to see some low-budget newbie e-house. Wow.

I wonder if they just expect consumers to do like me, and not bother with returns or complaints. If the publisher puts the onus on the author to produce error-free work and the author depends on editors to clean up after them, then I guess you get poor quality work.

That’s one way to trim costs in a tough economy.

The problem with Lora Leigh is that she has too many errors in her books - “Navarro’s Promise” problems just built upon the many problems/errors in “Live Wire” so I find it hard to believe that ANYONE even reads these books prior to publishing.

How many books does it take for me to stop reading an author? It depends. 
I kept reading Catherine Coulter’s FBI series for several books after she changed the heroine’s eye color after the first book; had the hero’s parents babysitting for them in one book and then had the hero’d dad dead for 8 years in the next; changed a secondary character’s name in the middle of another book; etc.  I stopped reading the series after I emailed Catherine Coulter about what was the correct name of the character and received a totally snarky email in response…sorry, but I’m not going to pay for a hardcover book from an author who’s apparently a total ass in real life.

There have been quite a few errors in Mary Janice Davidson’s “Betsy” books - including giving Betsy’s sister (step or half?) a birthday of 6-6-66 which made the sister older than the mother who gave birth to her.  The emails were responded to graciously by the author and the errors were fixed in the paperback versions.  So I kept on reading the series for several more books until I decided that the word count wasn’t worth the hardcover cost.

I loved the way that both Beth Kery and her publisher handled the major page screw ups in her first major publishing house book “Wicked Burn”—where pages were totally out of order like someone had picked them up off the floor and about 30 pages of the book (major love scene) were missing.  The publisher sent me a copy of the book for free since I had already returned my mess of a book to Borders.  If that hadn’t happened, I probably would never have read another book of hers again.

I’m kind of on the fence about future Lora Leigh books, but am hopeful that the reason her next “Pleasures” book was pushed back from a May 2011 publication date to a July 2011 date was to make sure that they have corrected all the errors this time.

BTW, I just thought of an example that happened to me.
I love Tara Janzen’s Steele Street series, and a few years ago, bought the latest one. There was a chunk at the end missing. This was a paper book and it was a publisher error.
I contacted the vendors, Amazon. But not only did they not wait for me to return the faulty copy, they sent out a corrected copy immediately, with a very nice apology. And yes, I bought the next books in the series. Everyone makes mistakes, so sometimes it’s how it’s corrected that counts.

Even minor typos and errors in books drive me nuts even though I know mistakes happen and something can go through rounds of editing and still have mistakes because no one is perfect (heck even my own MA thesis embarrasses me because it was somehow read and edited by 5 people and still the final product has errors that I can’t believe I missed) but this many mistakes would definitely put me off of an author permanently.

Fortunately, I’ve never bought a book with actual pages or paragraphs missing. If that ever happened I’d probably just blame it on a printing error and request a refund/new copy and would still buy books by that author and from that publisher. Unless it happened more than once.

This has never happened to me, and I’m glad of it.  Errors like that are extremely distracting to me, and while I’ll forgive a few in a published book—as in two or three—over about ten, I’d contact the publisher or whoever does the editing and ask for my money back.  If it ever got to the point of Navarro’s Promise bad, I’d try my damndest to get in touch with the author and demand to know why the hell no one proof-read the thing.

In my mind, there is NO excuse for bad writing of this particular kind.  A bad story, poor characterizations, WTF moments—all of those I can forgive, or at least tolerate.  They just mean I won’t be picking up any more of that particular author’s oeuvre.  Improper grammar, punctuation, etc. is detrimental to my reading experience, and it’s completely avoidable.  Even if an author can’t correct herself, there is someone else who can, guaranteed.  There are MANY someone elses who can.  To write a book in that condition and publish it and expect readers not to care is shameful.

Maybe this is a touchy issue with me because I work as a writing consultant at a university, helping freshmen on their papers.  I’ll forgive freshmen errors, not least because public school systems can provide very mediocre English instruction.  But a professional author can and should hold herself to a higher standard.  Writing is her trade, and if she can’t perform competently she should find another job.  I’m paying for entertainment in the form of literature, and if something blocks that entertainment, like grammatical errors, I’ll ask for a refund.

I figured out what happened with Navarro’s Promise, and I am so sorry.

The missing portion of the scene, the sex scene between Navarro and Mica somehow managed to find its way out of the file. I don’t know if I deleted it to fix it, or someone accidently (sic) deleted, or perhaps laid it aside to fix and forgot to put it back in. However it happened, it was inexcusable that I didn’t go over the file again to ensure the parts I was working on had been fixed propertly (sic).

I guess the publisher just did a dump from the file provided by the author and skipped that pesky editing process where this would get caught?  Sounds like something that could honestly happen if one were self pubbing the book, but isn’t one of the big things with publishers that they do things like provide you know, editing?

Do authors not receive proof pages to go over before a book is printed anymore?

Do publishers not have copyeditors anymore who review for things like grammar & spelling?

Everyone makes mistakes, so sometimes it’s how it’s corrected that counts.

It really does.

Do authors not receive proof pages to go over before a book is printed anymore?

I think so, but I would guess that an author who can’t spell-check or proof her/his own work successfully prior to final m.s. submission isn’t going to be able to catch errors at galley, either.

Aside from the errors, I really didn’t care for this book. Maybe it’s just that this series is too old but it seems like there’s this Breed Book Plot-O-Matic that she uses with the MATING and the KNOTTING and the BLAH BLAH and it just seems to have run its course as far as being interesting.

I read all of this particular Lora Leigh series, and I have to say that this isn’t really a new problem, except for the fact that there is text noticeably missing.  There are always continuity and timeline errors for the series as a whole (and sometimes even for the span of the story being told), as well as grammatical and spelling problems.  An educated fan with an ARC could probably do a much better job with this series than the current editor does.

You know all this talk about the responsibility of the publisher is particularly interesting in light of the really big deal publishers are making about how much all their editing etc. costs so they should be able to charge full price or almost full price for digital copies.  How ironic that just when publishers are using their great editing and publisher service to squeeze more money out of the readers we’re seeing more and more error in print and tolerate terrrible errors in digital.  One digital book was so screwed up that the apostrophe was replaced with another symbol almost all the way through the digital book.  Amazon certainly seems to be taking responsibility for the book products they sell while publishers are demanding Amazon charge their price instead of a discounted price and they’re skimping on their services.  Just saying….

Why am I not surprised that one of the 5-star ratings for the book is from someone who has never read a book they didn’t just love?
And yes to JoyK re: the irony.

I haven’t read Navarro’s Promise, but if the errors are as bad as reported, I most certainly would ask for my money back. I’ve read several of Lora Leigh’s kindle freebies, and wasn’t impressed with any of them, so this is just one more thing to add to my mental list of reasons not to buy… ever.

As for auto-buy lists, one great book will send me scrambling for backlists, and if they are all at least good, (or if at least 2 or 3 are good, depending on the size of the backlist) the author will go on my auto-buy list. Where I auto-buy will depend on how good/great they are. I haven’t counted, but I’d guess there are less than 10 authors whose books I pre-order so I get the new books right away, at full price. There are many others who I automatically buy if I see them discounted someplace or see a copy at the UBS. As prices go up, more are being switched from the full-price auto-buy list to the I’ll-definitely-buy-it-if-I-find-it-cheap list. I feel bad about it at times, but I read so much, I just can’t afford all the books I want to read at $8 a pop.

And it takes 2 or 3 bad books in a row for authors to drop off of that auto-buy at a discount list. I can think of 2 authors who have been switched from my auto-buy to never-buy list in the last few years because their most recent books seemed to be written by going down a checklist of predictable steps a romance novel must go through to meet minimum standards: Oh, look, he’s hot. Check. He’s a douche so she can’t sleep with him. Check. He’s still hot. Check. He does something nice for a child/dog/her mother. Check. He’s so damn attracted to her that he acts like a douche again. Check. Etc., etc., until the live predictably ever after, with auto-baby in the epilogue.

As for the usual errors, typos, misspellings and such, I find them annoying, but so long as they aren’t excessive, I can let them slip by without letting them pull me out of the story for long. I have found several eBooks that are just full of errors, enough that I’ve just stopped reading and deleted them (much less satisfying than throwing them against the wall). The worst mistakes seem to be on some of the free pre-orders. I’ve started thinking of them like ARCs, not quite finished yet, and you take your chances and hope for the best.

I did read one book with interesting mistakes awhile back. It was an older book, re-released in e-format by the author. I assumed it was an OCR scan of a print version because of the nature of the mistakes, but I could be wrong. What was interesting about the mistakes was that they were minimal, nearly non-existent, until the sex scenes. Then it seemed like whoever was helping edit the book was embarrassed by the sex, so they just skipped that part; no error correcting at all. Some of the mistakes were so bad, I couldn’t be entirely sure of what was happening: they did it right? Was it good? Did she enjoy it? Did he screw it up? Should I be pissed at him? I’d have to infer just how it went by their reactions in subsequent scenes. And yet, I kept reading because I had read several other books by this author that I liked and I liked the characters, setting and story. Even if I never was sure if the hero was any good in bed.

Which, of course, leads to the inevitable question: How many times must a guy be bad in bed before he drops off of your auto-boink list?

What? That’s not an inevitable question? Must just be me…

You know, I am not at all surprised by the errors and what appears to be missing scenes from the book.  A while back I won an ARC of this author’s book (not from this series) and was so excited to read it.  But after the few couple of chapters I stopped reading the book because there were so many errors in it that it was confusing and completely ruined the reading experience for me.

Then I read another book from the same series (which was a final copy) and there were still errors, though not as many and there were a few times that I thought whole paragraphs were missing because the story would stop making sense.

I used to love love love Lora Leigh. But the quality of her work is just not what it use to be.  And instead of being an auto buy author, now I think twice before even picking it up at the library.  I don’t know if the author is to blame, or the publisher for not providing a quality product to the market…either way it has turned me off of what used to be a favorite author.

I know that it is impossible to catch every error before it goes to print, and most times a few here and there don’t bother me, but not to the level that I’ve experienced with Lora Leigh’s books within the past few years.

I wish I could say I don’t see this ALL THE TIME in print books. I’ve said before how often I’m tempted to get out a red pen & mail the corrected book back to the author.  I finished Jill Shalvis’ “Animal Magnetism” the other day, & it occured to me that perhaps once an author reaches a certain level of popularity & sells X number of books they are relieved of all editing/proofing reading services because people buy the book regardless.

And in that vein, I read somewhere that JR Ward had hired an assistant to help with that pesky continuity stuff. “Lover Avenged” came out and I just laughed & laughed. Apparently she hired a poodle.

If I were buying instead of renting from the GBPL, believe me, I’d be first in line at the Borders return desk.

Was Berkley the house/imprint that featured on SBTB some months ago for having stiffed authors on fees? Because I seem to remember that that house turned out to only have one person on their entire editorial staff. Which would make this problem un-surprising in the extreme. Maybe someone can set me straight on whether my memory is at fault.

Meanwhile, I read a well-known author for the first time several months ago and was pretty taken aback at the numerous errors in word usage. The book was the first in a trilogy, and I’m fairly OCD, so I managed to get through the other two books, but I’ll never read another by her. It was just too distracting to read a sentence and end up laughing hysterically at the bizarre substitutions. It became a game of I wonder which word she really meant to use here? (Think lave vs. lathe or demur vs. demure.) I came to the conclusion that her editor either hated her or didn’t give a damn.

Having worked for a printer, I understand errors that happen in the bindery, because even with good quality control they’re easy to miss. However, editing errors that happen that consistently are sign of at least two people who are completely asleep at the wheel: the author and her line editor.

I’ve gotten my last few LL books from the library because of the crappy editing quality but this really takes the cake.  Her forum visitors are true diehards bc the only thing consistent about the last four or so Breeds books has been the lack of editing. Clothes changing color mid-paragraph, the wrong character being attributed sentences in obvious dialogues, find & replace errors. I can only assume that she sells so well that Penguin assumes readers don’t care.

I really wish that I had seen this post before I bought the book (paperback, not e-book).  Like many, the Great Recession has caused me to cut my book buying way back and I am now on a first name basis with the librarians in my town.  I don’t buy Lora Leigh’s other series but the breed books were an exception to my enforced frugality.  Navarro’s Promise was a mess and a big disappointment.  I just don’t see how it could have gotten 5 stars from anyone.  The fact that Navarro’s kaky (sp?) pants morphed into jeans was jarring but the total mess at the end where the h/h are in a hall and then suddenly getting out of a bed was ridiculous.  This is way beyond “mistakes happen” and it is inconceivable to me that this would have been missed by a professional editor.  I can understand an editor missing a typo or some grammar mistakes but several page missing?  It made no sense so how could anyone reading it think that this was supposed to be how it was meant to be?

I thought that there were no new themes here and the story had already been done by her in an earlier book and done much better.  Aside from the missing pages, the story did not make much sense.

!boggle!

I am not a Lora Leigh reader, so I can’t comment on content, but the thing that strikes me here is that we’re not talking about one error here, but a whole cascade of mistakes. 

There are at least two errors on the author’s end: first, the glitch whereby the missing scene evidently fell out of her main working file, and second, her failure to deliver a full and accurate final draft to her publisher.  The first is understandable—things like that happen.  The second is mystifying, and indicates either extreme sloppiness in proofing (how do you fail to notice that a whole scene is missing from your final manuscript?) or possibly a major FUBAR in the manuscript delivery itself.  Certain parts of the story as related above make me wonder if she turned the book in as a series of partials rather than as a complete manuscript.

Then there are at least two major process errors on the publisher’s end.  One: whoever accepted the final manuscript failed to note the missing content (and if the editor *let* Leigh deliver partials without demanding a complete file as follow-up, that editor should be in very hot water with upper management).  Two: the copy-editor failed to note the missing content—and a key sex scene missing from a novel in which sex scenes are a major selling point is a pretty big omission.  (Or else they didn’t copy-edit the book, which is a different but equally egregious mistake.)  So the book goes to production with missing content, and at least one more failure of process occurs: either Leigh never sees and reviews the page proofs, or else she gets page proofs and again fails to notice that a major sex scene is missing.

If I’d bought a copy of this book, I’d return it for a refund in a heartbeat; I’ll forgive production errors (and I’ve seen those from time to time), but this?  This is what the ‘Net would call an Epic Fail.  Depending on the precise circumstances of what happened behind the scenes, I think it’s possible that the editor involved could be disciplined or fired, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the publisher drops Leigh as soon as it’s contractually able to do so.

I agree with several others who’ve said that I’ve grown so accustomed to typos and grammatical errors in my ebooks they are just a blip now - barely noticed. Which is really, really sad. But missing pages, constant errors in timelines, clothing, etc, would get an author off my auto buy list in one book.

Kudos to Amazon, though, for their awesome customer service - I buy Kindle books more than any others for that very reason.

And shame on these Publishers who keep insisting the price of an ebook is justified by the work/cost they put in when it often feels like they’ve just tossed an unedited digital copy up for sale.

I haven’t read this book, haven’t read any LL for that matter.  But I am an author.  And I, like most authors, get paid one third of my advance on contract signing, one third on *satisfactory delivery of edits* and a third on publication.  I hope that whoever pays Lora Leigh has withheld those last two portions of her advance, because this does NOT sound as though a satisfactory final edit was ever delivered.  Because, if she was paid (and I have no reason to believe that she wasn’t, unless her contract is very different to most writers I know ) means that someone is paying without reading.  And that is the kind of thing that brings publishing houses crashing down…

This is interesting - I have read a lot of e-ARCs from Baen that evidently have less in the way of errors that published books (which presumably are supposed to be edited and spellchecked to within an inch of their lives) by certain other publishers. :-(

@Jane Lovering:

Honestly, all her books read like they were never read before being published, and I felt that way even when I generally liked her books and continued to buy them. Her grammar is atrocious, there are constant continuity errors, and she jumps from plot point to plot point so fast you never have any idea of what’s going on. Her books were definitely a “guilty pleasure” pleasure thing.

Well, it takes more than one good book for an author to become an auto-buy for me. I certainly don’t mind buying books, and I buy plenty, but I try to get books by unknown (to me) authors at the library. If I come across I book I think is superb, I’ll happily buy the book to keep. I like supporting authors. But once an author throws a dud or two in, I’m back to borrowing books by them. Right now I’m reading a library copy of the latest Cat and Bones book by Jeaniene Frost because I felt her two of her last three were weak.

I do take a chance on a new author if I can get a good deal on a book, either on kindle or with coupons/promotions in print form. If the book doesn’t wow me, I generally won’t buy another unless I see great reviews by people I know have similar tastes.

I wouldn’t hesitate to return a book as badly mangled as Navarro’s Promise seems to be. And I wouldn’t be buying another. I have so many books on my TBR pile it makes no sense for me to waste time slogging through a train-wreck like that. Even if it was essentially a very good book, I wouldn’t bother. There are too many very good books out there waiting to be read that don’t have the problems.

I used to love love love Lora Leigh. But the quality of her work is just not what it use to be.

Did Leigh have a good run in the middle of her output that I missed? I ask because I read some of her very early epub books and they were riddled with errors of spelling, grammar and word usage. The last mass market book I read (borrowed it from the library) was better than those early books, but still full of errors.

I hate to sound mean, but it drives me nuts that she’s able to sell so many books without doing what I consider the bare minimum for an author. I’m sympathetic to her poor spelling. I tell people that I’m the reason spellcheck was invented. My grammar is also sort of iffy, so I can sympathize there as well. The thing is, I wouldn’t expect to be paid for my writing without putting a serious effort into making sure that my weaknesses were corrected. I just can’t respect the fact that Leigh clearly doesn’t feel the need to do that.

Oh wow, I’d be really PISSED. I’m sorry, I know mistakes happen, but that’s a pretty jarring one. In this case I would demand a refund. That’s equivalent to getting a DVD with a scratch in it or going to the movies and having the electicity cut out for the last 20 minutes. Even if you fix it after the fact, it still totally ruined my escapist entertainment time.

I want to say that I’ve had good experience with Amazon in fixing my problems. Hubby had a graphic novel show up with missing pages. We fired off an email, they immediately apologized and sent a new flawless copy without asking us to send back the old one. Can’t ask for much more in these cases.

I was recently reading a book where the h/h were in the middle of a very steamy sexoring moment (hour) when the sidekick suddenly started talking.  I had an instant ‘what what in the butt’ moment and then (finally) realized that the hero was talking and the editor/writer had accidentally attributed the quote to the wrong character.  Ugh.  Total confusion.  I actually flipped back a few pages to try to figure out how sidekick got in on the action.

“What?  It’s a threesome?  How did I miss that?”  flip, flip, flip.  Skim.  “huh.  Oh.  Never mind.”

Editing is important!  If an author can’t stand to read through their entire work once all the way through before it goes to print, why do they expect me to pay full price for it?  Should there be a pricing structure based on effort?  Full price for books that have been edited and proofed.  Slight discounts for books that may or may not have continuity errors.  Large discounts (or free) for books where the author says “My name is enough.  In fact, my dog wrote this.”  No, I know.  Maybe we could start that society where your awesomeness dictates what you can charge (must have an upper limit, of course).  I can see it now, “Sorry, 800 people pointed out the missing sex scene.  You’re books are now worth $1.  As soon as 900 people say your books are worth it, we’ll up the price.”

I’m a bit of a lazy reader. If I ended up with a book/ebook with errors like this, I’d probably be “Eh, that’s the way it goes”, although I would be wary of buying another book from the same publishing house. (I’d blame the publisher before the author.)

This reminds me of the time I was reading a loooong ebook that turned out to have parts of the end mixed up in the middle of the book. Meaning I read the dramatic conclusion to a trial before I even knew why the hell the character was on trial for in the first place.

For me, it depends on the books and it depends on the errors. It also depends on the author. I have an auto-buy author who has had some (small) errors in the last couple of books in her series (not for lack of caring, and some mistakes were not her fault, she had marked things in the final stages of proofreading but they hadn’t been corrected) .
I LOVE this series and I follow the author’s online journal; I think that helps. The fact that she’s immediately apologetic and ready to get the errors fixed in the next printing keeps away bad feelings, at least for me. (And that I can see an error, go online, tell her about it and get a message back thanking me for noticing the mistake. I’ve seen quite a few errors in my reading life, but that experience isn’t the norm.)

That said, this case seems to be pretty extreme and I don’t think I’d keep buying from this author if I was a fan.

All I am going to say is that Lora Leigh was NEVER a “clean” writer.  She was the sort that had to undergo several rounds of editing.  Take it from someone that started to read her books over 7 years ago when she was first contracted by EC.  She has tons of rabid fangirls, so I am not surprised about the 5 Star reviews in Amazon.  The main reason why Berkley contracted her was not because she was a “clean” writer, but because she’s a money maker.  Period.  She was a bestselling author at EC for years, before she was contracted by a large print publisher, so it was a winning deal for them, given the fact that her fans never gave a damn about her lack of writing ability.  Most fans wanted the hawt sex and the Alpha male deal.. and yes, I do include myself in that category though I stopped reading the series about a year ago.

I am seeing more and more sloppy editing in ALL of the fiction books I read. It has become an epidemic. I am currently re-reading Karen Chance’s last book, Curse the Dawn. There are several continuity errors like the following:

I stared up at the dim arch of the Milky Way while I tried to get my breath back, only to have a drop of water hit me right on the cornea. I wiped it away, dragging my muddy sleeve across my forehead in the process. Of courseit would rain. Of course it would

and right in the very next paragraph (!!)

I still couldn’t see clearly, with only a sliver of moonlight for illumination

And still in the same scene, a few paragraphs later,

It had started to rain harder..

Now I don’t know what part of the world Ms Chance lives in, but here in Missouri, to get rain you have to have clouds. Not the Milky Way and a sliver of moon.

Laurell K Hamilton’s continuity is so awful it’s laughable. She doesn’t even bother to try to keep things straight. It just gets really annoying to see that publishers are not even trying to get things right any more.

Hate to say it, but I had gone dark web on the let two books in this series. My local library doesn’t keep LL’s titles, and the last few that I bought were so full of errors and general WTFery, that I refuse to put out any more of my becoming-scarce book budget. But this one is so poor that I can no longer even be bothered doing that. There’s lots more books in the TBR ocean, so I’m done.

Mireya wrote:

She was a bestselling author at EC for years, before she was contracted by a large print publisher, so it was a winning deal for them, given the fact that her fans never gave a damn about her lack of writing ability.  Most fans wanted the hawt sex and the Alpha male deal..

I have a couple authors I buy, even knowing that their writing will cause me to break out my mental editor’s pen (and I will freely admit that I’m not the best writer myself, so it’s probably bad when I can catch the problems). These authors include the kinds of tropes that are practically instant wins for me, and I have learned that there are certain kinds of writing problems I am willing to put up with to a certain extent (in the case of one author, the problems are infodumps and purple prose). Still, there is a twinge of pain every time I shell out for their books…and yet I can’t seem to help but keep buying.

Funny enough, I love the Breed series. Of course, I also skip the porn (so roughly, what 60% of the book?) because I like the Breeds being more like Dark Angel transgenics in the purpose and scope of their ability as weapons. It appeals to the scifi side of my nature. Unfortunately, you have to deal with some the most boring sex ever. I’m not a porn person. I avoid in fanfic at nearly all cost, and that’s free, so I don’t rightly need a whole book that way. And all her Breeds are turnings into sketch-a-males. I had decided to skip Navarro’s based on reading about 10 in the series, but now I’m glad I did. The only thing I’ll miss is seeing Cassie, I think that’s the wolf/coyote kid, get her story. Dawn’s story is still her best book in my opinion, but those more introspective stories are rare. Also, it wasn’t all about penis and vagina (or butt or mouth or any combination thereof).

The larger problem industry-wide I’ve noticed is the lack of care in product. I’ve noticed some errors (some big, some little) in a lot of books lately.  I get that the publishers want to make some bank, but you’re going to stop making money if people get fed up and find a house with a little more care in the product. Books aren’t cheap, no matter what format. I know businesses are cutting costs, but taking away a main staple like editors is beyond silly. And I’ll say I started noticing more when the 6th Harry Potter book came out. Not to say it wasn’t obvious with a lot of previous auhors but it felt like every publisher wanted The Next Big Thing without doing the work necessary to maintain.

I wish I loved more of Lora Leigh’s work, but the disappointment over Jonas’s book kind of sealed the deal for me. Too many of her good characters are just sex organ holders, and that’s about it. (I also got tired of the anal being in at least 6 sex scenes a chapter.)

If I were the purchasers, I would request a refund from either retail location or publisher if they were unwilling to send a fixed/updated version free of cost. As much as we love books, sometimes you have to associate the cost of the book instead of your love of source material. Get to the pocketbook of it all. I don’t mind mind minor grammar/edit problems since my grammar is so atrocious I’d never notice. However if it was a major problem, yeah, it’d be a dealbreaker (ie, changing someone’s name in the middle of a paragaph, highlighting both).

Anyone who reads Lora Leigh has a high tolerance for errors to begin with.  I used to be a huge fan of hers, but her books for the past 2 years have been extremely sloppy.  In her Elite Ops series there are all kinds of timeline and editing issues: the number of years passed is different in one paragraph than in the next, characters suddenly become younger.  Everything a good editor would catch.
Not to mention every storyline is the same just with different character names.
I gave up on her completely after Live Wire came out and the hero suddenly became a decade or two younger… come on.  I don’t expect realism, but I do need consistency.  Particularly when the old characters are revisited so often and every time it tears me out of the story to contemplate the WTFery..

Another time I have to say it is too bad this junk gets on the shelves.  In the dark ages, I set galleys, then set galleys electronically.  Yeah, that long ago.  I picked up so many errors they let me edit.  I don’t care if it is a library book, sometimes I have to go get a pencil to fix something.  I used to think Avon was the typo king, but they have improved. 
That substituting code for apostrophes, etc., is code-related and electronic and can be fixed.  I see it in emails where it is not a big deal cuz I don’t PAY for them.
I remember reading an ad for the Elite Ops series and wishing I could write that stuff.  I’m okay now.

OMG, editing or the lack thereof in books these days is a HUGE peeve of mine and I have no qualms about calling authors on it when I write reviews. The Navarro book sounds like what I call a blind drunk monkey book ie a book so badly edited and/or proofread that it must have been done by a blind drunk monkey. Certainly no human should want to take the “credit”!

I hope the reader gets her refund and I hope Ms Leigh and her publisher get this sorted out. Readers deserve better than this and there are authors I no longer buy, read or recommend because of the editing or lack thereof.

I thought editors were supposed to catch those types of errors.  Then again, doesn’t an author feel compelled to reread her own writing to make sure she’s making sense?

A friend of mine stops reading a book the moment she sees a typo or misspelled work.  Me, I get my red pen & start looking for errors.  I don’t stop reading, I just go slower and am less involved with the story.

Yes, mistakes do happen, but professionalism means that we own up to them and fix them, quickly and with grace.  Since when is it acceptable to produce a shoddy product, then ignore the outcry of your loyal customers until it reaches deafening levels?

If you want to be a professional writer, learn to write and spell, or hire some starving English major/recently laid-off librarian to do it for you.  It’s your name on the cover, do you want us to associate it with lame-ass prose?  Coherence and consistency matter, otherwise we’d all just read free fanfic.

If you are a publisher who charges money (esp. as you repeatedly tell me that digital versions need high price points to pay for all that editing and those *super-cool* photoshopped covers), then provide the services for which we are paying.

What’s the saying? “Burn me once, shame on you.  Burn me twice, shame on me?”
It only takes one great book to send me scurrying for an author’s backlist.  But while I’ll forgive a few minor typos, consistent or major errors pull me out of the story and make me suspicious of any future purchases from that author, and from that publisher.

I love physical books, love the idea of an industry centered on the care and feeding of the objects that have pulled me through some horrific events in my life and nurtured my heart and mind.  But I’m close to giving up on “legacy” publishers.  If a known house like Berkley can’t be bothered to edit, it’s just another step in the spiral towards industry bankruptcy; we are not captive customers, we have other options. 

Even bestselling authors (Barry Eisler, etc.) are moving towards self-publishing; as the stigma recedes and stories of high quality self-published works become commonplace, what do these slipshod publishers think will happen?  Or are they just trying to hold it together for another quarterly earnings report and hope they’ll make it to retirement before the customer base shrinks to nothing?

I’d rather pay $3.99, knowing the author gets the largest cut, and take the risk that the editing might suck than to pay $8, where the author gets significantly less than 10%, and know that it will.  In three years, I bet the bulk of my reading will be self-published authors, with trips to the library for those legacy authors I can’t live without. 

That’s sad, but the industry is slitting it’s own throat with books like these.

OK, I’ll stick my head up here and give a view from the other side of the fence. But please know that as a reader, I would not be happy to buy a book that’s riddled with errors, either. It. Drives. Me. Bat-shit crazy up the wall *g*

When I get my copy-edited proofs emailed back for me to check over, I go over them with a fine-toothed comb, printing out and comparing the editor’s final ms version, to the copy-edited version. I go through with a ruler and a pencil and highlight each and every single thing I find that doesn’t match. Some I’ll agree with, some I’ll consult about, some are just plain ‘Huh? What the frick did they do that for? Now it makes no sense!’

Then I laboriously type up a loooong email listing chapter, page, paragraph, line, in the phrase ‘blah blah blah’ pls reinstate this/change this/delete this/insert this (etc) so the phrase now reads ‘blah blah blah’.

The thing is, from here on, it doesn’t matter how vigilant I’ve been. Once I’ve sent off that looooong email requesting all my changes, I have no control over the final proof. So far, I’ve never received a proof back to check it through again. So I can only hope—pray—that the copy-editor agrees with me, and decides to make each change I’ve requested before the book is released.

I’m not saying that this is the case with all publishing houses—each one has their own way of doing things. But please believe me, as an author, it’s heartbreaking to get a final proof of your book and find errors—especially if they are ones that you’ve requested be fixed but have apparently been missed in the final process. And to have readers and reviewers commenting on errors when you’ve spent days going through that manuscript and you know you asked for them to be fixed…. well, suffice it to say, tears of frustration have been shed.

And apparently I need an editor.  Sorry about the typos…sigh.  Though, in my defense, I’m not a professional writer, nor do I play one on TV.

As a side question: what is happening to all of those fabulous editors now that publishers have downsized?  Is there a flourishing freelance editing industry?

@Tessa.  The Chicago Tribune had a little blurb today that electronically available books have just outstripped sales of tradionally published books. (Numbers, not dollars, I believe, was the reference.)

I am taking my book back to Borders. It was on my TBR pile.
Too many good books out there, and not enough time to waste on bad books. And WTF why give a 5 out of 5 on a bad book?
          Just a ordinary reader,
                    Bernie

For me it totally depends on the scope of the problems. I’ve read print and e-books with some strange insertions, like the author’s name and the title of the book randomly showing up in the text near the end of the book. While that made me scratch my head, it didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the book. A few minor typos, missed commas, and even occasionally a miss-tagged conversation won’t upset me too much. I wrote a report at work today that two other people read, and all of us missed that I had the wrong part number in the background.

But constant, consistent, WTFery which makes me want to reach for my red pen (or look for temporal disturbances to account for continuity errors) is all it takes for me to avoid an author like homework over summer break.

What amazes me is the number of great reviews. What were those reviewers reading? How would you trust them again.

As a reader of old fashioned, non-digital books, I would not consider making the missing portions of the book available on the internet a real solution. I do not by books so I can read to page whatever, go to the internet to read a bit more, come back to the book ‘til the next missing section.
I would not return the book. I would toss it in the recycling bin after ripping it in sections so some poor worker on the recycling line won’t try to pick it out to read. Then I would put the author and publisher on a do-not-read list.

Would you go back to a restaurant where the food is terrible and the service is worse?

I definitely find more spacing/spelling errors in ebooks than hard copies. However, as someone who recognizes my own wild superpickiness, I try to let it go and not distract myself with it.

But..if a chunk of the book was missing as in this case? Um, no thank you!

I used to be a huge fan of Lora Leigh, but I remember reading Megan’s Mark and thinking WTF happened to the timeline. I quit buying her books new at $8 and started getting them at the UBS for $2 but even that stopped at one (I forget the title, but it was one of the earlier SEAL books) when the first word of the book was plural (I believe it was like Fives Years Ago or something). Ever since it’s become a game when I pick them up to find the first typo since it’s usually on the first page. :) Plus her sex scenes have become insert tab A into notch B…ugh. I find more adventurous sex in instruction manuals.

I’d return it. The product is defective IMO.

I received an ARC of Kelley Armstrong’s Haunted a few years ago and was completely pulled out of the story by a repeated paragraph (2-3 times). I actually bought the book when it was released just to figure out if the mistakes where corrected (they were :) ). That IMO is a job well done. The big mistakes and most of the small typos and glitches are caught pre-publication.

I do have to give some well deserved praise to Amazon for defending their products (though I despise their business practices). I’ve never had such a wonderful experience as with their customer service ever. If a video on demand didn’t have a strong connection and the movie was awfully fuzzy they refunded my money (without me having to send a complaint) or difficulty with downloading an MP3 or an ebook that couldn’t be purchased.

I don’t buy new LL any longer.  I bought two of them, mid-range in the series.  Mid-range in a LL series is not a good place to be.  She really messes up her world building, timeline problems, rule breaking galore.  I just put her down & went used.  She certainly doesn’t get shelf space dedicated to her oeuvre.

This is where the electronic world scares me.  If we run out of used paperbacks, will I be forced to pay full retail?

LL’s last, oh I don’t know, dozen books - maybe more - have been so loaded with typos, mistakes in grammar and problems remembering which character is who that it’s ridiculous.  I frequently wonder if she’s “big” enough that she’s told them that she doesn’t need an editor to fully go over her ms, so they just have someone scan them for the really awful stuff and leave it at that.  I know it’s nitpicking, but look at the spelling errors in her blog post.  She’s a professional writer responding to a very big customer concern, crafting a serious professional response and she misspells two simple words?

I have some of her random non-series books, about ten of the Breed books and a handful of the SEALs and Ops books.  I keep buying them because every so often, she’ll write a good story.  Unfortunately, after that, there’ll be one or two crap books and just when I think I’m done, she’ll write another good one and I’m hooked again.  I talk myself into overlooking the incredibly bad editing because sometimes I like her stories.

I was done with the Breeds because the last, I think it was three, were so bad that I just can’t justify even waiting for a good one anymore.  Then I get a box in the mail and it’s a damn copy of Navarro’s Promise that my mom bought me.  Grr.

I’m done with her books now period.  I’ll put up with significantly bad editing from any other major author probably twice now before I start complaining.

Can I remind people about this post next time the old “The editing of this self-pubbed book stank, so I will NEVAH buy another self-pubbed book AGAIN” chestnut comes around?

I’ve been reading quite a lot of stuff (not just m/m) from Smashwords lately and have yet to see a single book with anything like this level of errors in it. In fact the editing is as clean or cleaner than from most of the larger epubs. I’ve been seeing a certain midlist Romance author spending a lot of time on the Amazon Forums spreading muck about the low quality of Smashwords/self-pubbed books and how no one should ever buy an ‘indie’ because they are never ever properly edited.

Yet the worst offenders are the trad publishers, very often. Funny that.

I’ve never read Lora’s Breeds series, but I have read her Seals and Elite Ops sets.  And there has never been missing pages from those that I can tell; however, there are mass grammatical errors, names that are wrong, and mixing up of tenses, and even on occassion words that shouldn’t be there.  I’ve long tired of first names becoming the last name, or the entirely wrong character name being entered in a scene.  The only reason I came back to her books was because I wanted to know how the series ended.  I wanted to see how each character’s story played out. 
I cringe at the errors and even curse whatever editor she has that doesn’t catch these things.  If the average reader picks up on mistaken names, missed or added words, and terrible grammer, then any beta reader and/or editor worth their salt should be able to do the same.
With the conclusion of the Elite Ops, I can honestly say that I will likely never pick up one of Lora’s books again.  They are truly predictable and cringe worthy with their glaring errors.

Several people here are taking the author to task, but it’s not always the author’s fault. A friend of mine just had her first book printed. She went over and over and over the galleys, making corrections to things - even things that weren’t in her original manuscript. They published THE WRONG VERSION. They did NOT publish the version she signed off on. She is devastated. Their response, ‘mistakes happen.’ They are not willing to correct their error. The editor sent the wrong galleys (two versions old) to the printer. You’d think a publishing house would have quality control in place to prevent this, but no. My author friend can’t do anything about it - she has spoken to both the publishing house and her agent. The gist of it is, if she ever wants to get published again, she just needs to get over it and accept it. So the joy of finally getting her first book published is way overshadowed by this sort of shoddy work, and yes this is a fairly major house. Like all the publishing houses - the bottom line rules, so editors don’t even have time to edit anymore. It’s a shame, and is helping to contribute to the low levels of literacy in this country.
Now with Lora Leigh - good god, she’s published enough books that SHE should be able to get some response from her publishing house, and in my opinion, it is up to authors such as her - whose career is established - to raise a ruckus.

I bought a book from Sony’s e-reader store* last year (Julie Anne Long, Beauty and the Spy) that did not have punctuation. You could never tell when a person started or finished talking. Tried downloading it several times and reported this, their absolutely useless customer service was no help. And the book is paid for but not read. Gave up.

*never to be repeated

I’m not a writer and everything I’ve learned about publishing has been through random blog posts, so obviously there’s a lot I don’t know. But I have to ask, at what point does the blame for these types of errors go to the author instead of editors/publishers?  Of course editors are vital, but when you, as an author, can’t even keep track of your characters’ names from one paragraph to the next, I’m not going to mentally curse out the publisher. Well, I will a little because they choose to pay these incompetent writers (but why shouldn’t they if the books inexplicably popular), but if an author needs THAT much editing, in every damn book she writes, she’s clearly a bad writer. By the time all the mistakes are corrected you might as well credit the editor as the real author.

Or is it that these types of errors by writers are so ubiquitous that we have to blame the publishers, because they’re obviously just choosing not to edit certain authors as thoroughly as others? Please don’t tell me that Leigh’s books are typical of pre-edited versions of other authors’ works. That would be really depressing.

While I agree that authors sometimes write sloppily and there’s no excuse for not remembering a character’s name from one paragraph to the next, I also know as an editor and designer that proofing your own work is very difficult. Our eyes just skip over words we have mistyped ourselves. Which is why an outside editor is critical. You must have fresh eyes looking at the material to catch the errors.

It’s absolutely true that where production errors are concerned, authors and readers both end up in the role of victim.  It’s also true that proofing one’s own work can be a challenge—I’ve found typos in published material of mine that I kick myself for having missed.

But by all accounts—including the author’s—what happened here wasn’t a production error.  In order for the manuscript to reach the typesetting/printing stage in the state it did, at least three different people—the author, the in-house editor, and the copy editor—all must have failed not just to properly proof the manuscript for grammar and spelling errors, but to note that material was actually missing from the document(s) they were working with.  A normal editorial process allows both the author and editor multiple chances to catch this kind of thing; in this case, those multiple chances were either blown or the normal process was short-circuited.

Moreover, when production errors happen, the publisher can sometimes recoup its losses by requiring the printer to absorb the cost of producing replacement copies.  When authorial or editorial errors happen, especially of this magnitude, the publisher has no such recourse.  Which is why I’m not going to be surprised if heads roll as a result of this situation.

I don’t know about the States, but I’m willing to bet that you have the same laws as us in the UK about things purchased having to be ‘of merchantable quality and fit for purpose’.  Sounds like this book was neither, therefore - money back, no questions asked, under consumer law.

This is some SERIOUS WTFery. I am on Lora Leigh’s list and heard the commotion. I read the book and know exactly where the missing

love scene is. I definitely will [would] pursue a refund. Money is tight and times are hard. People shelled out $, and in most cases saved and denied themselves something to buy this book & to get such a sucky CS answer. smh Either take the book back or hold off reading it til LL posts the missing info. Though, that suggestion in itself won’t work because die hard fans, including myself, read the faulty book 24-48 hrs after it was released.

I bought the Kindle version of Guilty Pleasure by Lora Leigh last fall and there were so many errors it made the book hard to read, so I started highlighting them and ended up emailing them to the author, publisher and finally Amazon.

I never heard anything back from the first two, but Amazon emailed me back within a couple of days and indicated there was a new version available. I’d already finished the book so I didn’t check to see if corrections were made, but I just downloaded the book again and it seems many of the errors are still there.

It bothered me that I never even got an acknowledgement of the email I sent to the author. I get that people get tons of email but as an author who publishes an address for fans to use you should have some way of acknowledging that a message was received.

I really like to finish series once I start reading them and I’ve read all the other Breed books, but because of the issues already found in the new book and the bad impression I got with Guilty Pleasure, I’m not sure I’ll buy this book unless I see clear signs its been fixed.

By the way…some of the errors in Guilty Pleasure:

His jaw clench as rage threatened to flood him.

Who ha seen them? Someone must have if his information was correct.

Neith father nor my godfather runs my life for me, Vince.

When book sales went down, it seemed like publishers fired many of their editors. Now they’re paying the price for this by releasing books full of errors… which just makes buyers unhappy, makes the author look stupid, and lowers sales figures.

I highly dislike the Agency model, so when I hear things like this about their books it just solidifies my resolve not to purchase any of their books.

This is very timely because I’m in the middle of How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper. Good writing, poor editing.

First, don’t read the back cover if you’re interested, because it spoils a secret that isn’t answered until 57% through (yes, I did the math). It also gets the main character’s name wrong, referring to her as Mo Wenstein instead of Mo Duvall-Wenstein. Which is irritating enough on a purely factual level, but her name is also a minor plot point.

In the text itself, there are a few minor mistakes like blocking errors when first she’s behind the couch, then teleports in front of it. It pulls me out of the story while I reread and try to figure out when she walked around the couch, but it’s small enough it doesn’t really ruin the story for me.

However. On p. 126, Cooper changes from wolf to human, drapes the quilt over his lap, and looks sheepish. Then, on p. 127, Cooper changes from wolf to human, wraps the quilt around his waist, and looks mortified. Two different versions of the same scene have been placed back to back. It dropped me out of the story so fast I got whip lash. It’s especially disorienting because this is one of the pivotal scenes in the book, but the erroneous repetition snapped the momentum.

http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html
I found this through regretsy today - it seems apropos. Maybe Ms. Howett has a big career ahead of her if she can learn to keep away from an argument?
I actually read Navarro’s Promise within this last week and did not notice the missing scenes. I just kept noticing the repetition and grammar and spelling.
But I fell asleep while reading the book - so I just assumed that I had been sleep-reading during anything that didn’t make sense. There are a few authors who repeat information from chapter-to-chapter, book-to-book to the point that I start to feel whiny. But I keep buying their books. Maybe the repetition helps me sleep? There must be something about it I like, because I keep buying the darn things and reading them right away.

Given the magnitude of the errors described, I would want my money back and maybe a free copy of the corrected book.  The bottom line is this, the PUBLISHER screwed up and should have to fix it.  Yes, the author has some culpability but at the end of the day the publisher must produce properly printed books.  Period. 

I am appalled at the idea that the digital file is being treated the same way as the printed books.  I have received numerous messages from Amazon telling that there is corrected material available.  With just a quick click, my book updates.  What’s so different about this book that they don’t seem to be willing to do this?

As far as how many books I will read by an author before I give up, well that depends on a lot of factors.  There is one author I tried multiple times because she is loved by so many people.  She has tons of books by multiple publishers in many series. I really, REALLY tried to read her books.  I purchased the books used or borrowed them from the library.  Thank goodness!  At first, I didn’t mark the spelling or grammatical errors.  At first, I didn’t cross reference the glaring errors in the stories or make notes about the stupidity of the continuing storylines from book to book.  But after reading a couple of her books, I couldn’t resist.  And once I started paying attention, I was appalled by the sheer number of errors or contradictions.  Really?  I can only assume that some publishers, editors, authors and publicists just don’t give a crap about quality control.

On a more positive note, there are many authors I read that have super high quality on all counts.  Their work is well written, well edited, beautifully laid out on the page and they even have fab covers.  So honestly, I think this is a small group of people who produce such poor quality material.  Anyway, that’s my thoughts.

I must be lucky.  The only major errors I’ve ever seen are when the pages get misprinted and/or mis-bound.  The most recent was a Lisa Kleypas book the last 30 pages were out of order.  It seemed to be a batch thing, as I went back to Borders and found a copy with pages in the right order.  And it was another Kleypas book where some of the odd-number pages were double-printed, making the words blurry and hard-to-read.

But I’ve never seen a multitude of spelling and writing errors.  The occasional error, but nothing that interrupted my reading flow.

There is a reason why I have a “borrow from library” classification for authors. She’s been on it for a while because I’ve enjoyed the world she’s built up with the Breed series. However, the last few books have been ultimately unsatisfying and I didn’t even bother finishing the last one. Between that and what I’ve been hearing about the latest book, I’m taking her off my reading list entirely unless I have a compelling reason.

I read a trilogy last year that I’m shocked that I not only finished the first book, but read the other two in the series due to the fact the editing was beyond *horrible*. The trilogy was riddled with typos, continuity errors, and other things that a copy editor at the very least should have caught, let alone a content editor. The authorial voice and setting were so compelling for me, though, and I’m sad there likely won’t be a fourth book to wrap up this one straggling storyline left open at the end of the third book. I can, and will, lay blame for any lack of sales the author saw squarely on the fact the book were obviously in no way edited. When recommending books as a librarian, I truly can’t justify doing so with a beyond inferior product.

Why am I not surprised that one of the 5-star ratings for the book is from someone who has never read a book they didn’t just love?

Anna - LOL. Every time I get a positive review on Amazon, I have to click on the “see all my reviews” so I can see if it’s an everything-I-read-is-awesome reviewer. It’s sick and twisted but I can’t just say “Oh how nice - they liked the book!” I have to see if they like ALL books and if they do, the review isn’t meaningful.

And Christie - my heart just broke reading about your friend. I would be devastated.

The day the rights revert back to her she should publish the correct version on Amazon.

I wish I could say I don’t see this ALL THE TIME in print books. I’ve said before how often I’m tempted to get out a red pen & mail the corrected book back to the author.

I’m getting ready to retire from my ‘day’ job and have been thinking of taking up proofing, etc.  I wonder if using the above ‘trick’ would work instead of a resume?  LOL

I haven’t read any of this particular series.  She’s not an automatic author of mine, but I do have several of her books and generally enjoy her storylines.

I never have understood why there are so many typos in ebooks unless it is because whatever program is being used to convert typed text into e-text is doing it (ex. ampersands where apostrophes should be).

I once read an ebook that was missing every letter ‘L’.  Luckily, or should I say ” ucki y” for me, it was a library book, so I didn’t have to worry about getting MY money back - but I’m pretty certain if I had bought it, I’d be extremely upset.

I love Ms Leigh’s explanation that the scene “found its way out of the file.” The lack of agency is fascinating. Next thing you know, authors and publishers will be blaming SkyNet for the errors in their books.

Ugh.  I know I tried reading a LL Breeds book several years ago and the appalling spelling and grammar issues were enough to make me not finish the story.  Once was enough for me—I haven’t bought anything by her since.  The fact that she’s gotten a whole pile of books published—and now probably makes a significant amount of money from these steaming piles—makes this sort of thing absolutely inexcusable.

Oh well—there are plenty of other published authors in the sea who can actually proof their work or pay for it to happen.

Lora Leigh is an author I will not buy. I will check her books out from the library, though.  She’s lost me as a revenue source. She cannot seem to write well enough that a reader can tell the difference between tantalizing clues and confusing and irrelevant point plots. And my comment to the author is: please, please, please get some beta readers and a professional editor that actually edits.

I’ve only ready the Breeds series when there is a novella in an anthology I’ve picked up, but I’ve read all but the latest in the Seals/Ops series and some of the Pleasures books, and am nodding my head with the others.  Continuity issues, timeline WTFery, repetition, grammar problems, logic errors, all there.  And thanks for the heads-up that Jordan gets younger, LOL.  She’s been a library loan or UBS buy for me.  Not ready to give up completely, because there’s just something that keeps me coming back, but not about to pay full price.

And that’s really my continuum.  There are authors whose previous fabulousness had me buying them right when published, even hardback if that was what it took.  Then one or two “meh” books and I’m on the library wait list instead. Or figuring that I’ll eventually catch it on the clearance rack.  But giving up completely takes an act of congress for me, especially if there’s a series involved.

Here’s what I don’t understand…authors who don’t know how to spell, know nothing about grammar or punctuation, and who are completely clueless about self-editing.

Writing itself is defined as meaningful letters that constitute readable matter. If an author can’t spell, how exactly is that readable matter?

In their line of work, wouldn’t behoove authors to learn about grammar and punctuation? At least then, they would know if their editor misses something or screws something up.

Maybe I’m too naive, but I just don’t understand how writers can be writers without knowing the full and proper usage of the language they write. Not knowing, in my opinion, is no excuse, and after having written as many books as she has, Lora Leigh should have learned more about grammar, spelling, and punctuation by now. The fact that she hasn’t, to me, reeks of a lackadaisical attitude.

And I left out “it” before behoove. Just saw it. Rats. Now, I’ll smack my own hand for not self-editing!

I would definitely return a book with errors (and I have).  I’ve probably purchased half a dozen paperbacks that were missing pages (and filled with duplicate pages). I have no problem sending them back to Amazon or going back to Barnes & Noble and exchanging the book.  The worst was a book I had been waiting months to come out.  I started reading it late on Friday night and discovered when I got to the 200s that it jumped to the 300s.  Of course I had to stop reading and exchanged it first thing the next day.
What’s frustrating with an ebook is that you can’t tell if the author just wrote the book poorly, intentionally skipped scenes, or there was a publishing mistake…

Some authors make more “mechanical” ie spelling, grammar, mistakes than others. Some make continuity mistakes. Me? I echo. My mind seizes on a word or phrase that it likes and thinks “I’ll use that again - soon.” And I never see it. If an editor I worked with didn’t pick it up, I’d start to worry.

But the author that does all of them and more is a real problem. An editor can only give so much time to a book. He or she will do what they can to clean it up, and sometimes will ask the author to correct repetitions of an error herself. If there are a forest of errors, it’s less likely that they’ll all be picked up.

But there’s another issue here. I never liked the idea of one single format for ebooks. Too much room for abuse. But reducing the formats - hell, yeah. Mobi, pdf and epub, perhaps, or maybe substitute html for mobi (recent techie sites have undone Amazon format books, which are locked mobi, to find a hidden epub file inside - is Amazon going epub?)
Soooo - each format has to be checked. Each has its individual quirks and problems. When I convert pdf to mobi for my Kindle, I often get nonsensical line breaks, for instance, but it doesn’t happen with other formats. That means six times the work, if it’s done properly. So reduce the formats, maybe? Get one or two right, and leave the customer to do the rest? Or the vendor? Make Amazon work for its cut?

I am a gamer and a reader of sci-fi, and have had something similar happen in the past.

In my edition of Snow Queen (Joan D. Vinge), there is a chapter that is repeated verbatim about 4-5 chapters later in the book (iirc it is chapter 34). The book is otherwise a very enjoyable read and well edited.

In one of the splat books for White Wolf, an entire paragraph or more is removed and two resulted statements are elided mid-paragraph. While it is not a great book (it is a gaming information book), there is no other area that is nearly so egregious.

I did not ask for refunds for either of these books. However, I did not buy another White Wolf book for some time, because I was highly irritated by the error.

In general I find typos and grammatical errors to be very jarring. It is rare that a story is so gripping that I forget about the medium I’m experiencing it in.

Wow,  I actually feel pretty dumb right now.  I bought Navarro’s Promise the day it came out (I had two other books to buy that day too, saving money on gas by making one trip).  And read it the following week.  I can honestly say that I don’t recall missing a sex scene, or that there seemed to be a lot of editing errors.  Now I will have to reread it to see how I missed them, I really don’t remember any that stood out enough to make me pause in my reading.

That having been said, the Breed series is the only series that I buy by Lora so I haven’t noticed an editing problem in her other books so I can’t comment on that, however if I noticed it consistently in her other Breed books I would probably stop buying them after two bad books.  I believe in giving second chances but not thirds.  (The fact that everyone here seems to have noticed editing errors on past books and Navarro’s Promise except me worries me ^_^)

All in all though, I think this is a problem that is more due to the publisher.  Yes, the author wrote the book and they are responsible for their writing, but that just means (to me) that I should only be upset with the author if the story is crappy.  The publisher is supposed to be editing and proofreading the books.  The publisher is the one that is supposed to be sending the author pages filled with red ink regarding errors (sort of like my english teachers). 

I can’t spell, I truely can’t, and before I hand in any of my college essays I always make certain to take them to the editing center on campus, why? Because I have read my writing so many times that even if there was an error right in front of my nose, in bold italics, I might not see it because I know what I meant to say and my brain would just skip over the mistake and fill in the correction without me noticing.  How do I know it does this?  Because I always take a third or fourth draft in to the editing center and they still find typos, spelling errors and sentances that end randomly (like in the middle of a word, I still don’t know how I missed THAT).  But after I take it to the editing center I expect to have all those pesky typos, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and any other visible problems to be solved.  If the writing sucks, then that’s on me, but the rest of it is supposed to be fixed at the editing center, that’s why I pay them to proofread my essays.  If there IS an editing error in my paper when I get it back then I am upset with the editing center (again if the writing sucks it’s all me), but I expect the rest of it to be fixed by the person I am paying to fix it.

So, I guess what I am trying to say is that I place more blame on the publisher than on the author.  But like so many people here have stated, it truely depends on how the situation is handled, by the vendor, the author, and the publisher.

I first read Leigh’s book “Coyote’s Mate” and loved it. I did notice a few errors, but chalked it up to human mistakes. I have since followed the Breed series and noticed a huge decline in her quality of writing and character development since then in this series and her other series, Elite Ops. In fact I am so tired of self editing her books that I gave her one last chance with her most recent Elite Ops book and was bored to death. Her sex scenes were the only area that I found no editing problems, but I’m sad to report it feels like she recycles the same thing over and over again and tweaks them in places. She’s Lazy and I’m bored because I read this in her last book. Her stories are predictable and plot poorly developed. I picked up her new book thought about buying it, but told myself to put it back down. The last ones weren’t good what makes you think she improved in this one. It is very disappointing that her writing has gone down hill so quickly, but I’m glad people are finally calling her on it. I was beginning to think it was just me!
I’m also so glad I didn’t buy the book or the ebook.

I’ve been reading the Breeds series on my Kindle for the past month or so.  I started with Book 1 and just finished Styx’s Storm.  (So-so book.) 

It turned out the next (Kindle) book in the series was one of four stories in an anthology and was priced at $9.99.

It’s upsetting enough to pay full price for an e-book but to pay $9.99 for a book in which I’ll read only one out of four stories nearly pushed me over the edge.  I finally decided to buy the damned thing, though, because a reviewer mentioned the story included an important plot point in the series.

Novarro’s Promise is the next (e-) book in the series and I just found out about the missing section.  I wanted to have Amazon delete it from my Kindle and refund my money until a revised book came out but I bought the book for $6.99 and I’m pretty sure the publisher will charge the full $7.99 for the revised version.

I’ve purchased all of Lora Leigh’s books but (with the exception of the Breeds) stopped a few months ago when the publishers charged full prices for the Kindle versions. It just offends me, especially if the author or publisher don’t seem to proofread the books before publishing them.

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Was this a spam?  I hope so.

Just checked Lora’s website for the promised missing pages…still not there.
Very disappointing for myself considering that like many of your posts I have been reading Breeds since the first novel and I have brought them all.
I totally agree that the over all quality has declined especially since she moved from EC. I am finding it hard and have taken her off my auto buy until others have brought her book an no mistakes have been made.
Lora’s communication on her website has been neglectful and I feel down right disrespectful for the hundreds of dollars I have spent buying all her series…
Rant over.
Wendy

So, there is nothing on the website. I was waiting for the book to be fixed before I purchased it on Kindle. This is sloppy and unprofessional. A simple post providing an update on the status of fixing this huge error would take five minutes. Lora Leigh needs to get it together.

Hand65
I’m waving my hand 65 times waiting for this woman to fix her book.