Review: Heroes

Heroes by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a really difficult book for me to rate.

On the one hand, it's a well-told story, the pacing is good, the snark is excellent, the main character grapples with significant issues in a well-rendered manner.

On the other hand, the copy editing is abysmally bad. I feel frankly disrespected by how bad it is. This is why I waited for the book to be on sale; I sampled it and found "robed" spelled "robbed" and thought, "I'm not paying $4.99 for that." I'm willing to pay a little more for an indie book that has impeccable editing, like Melissa McShane's, for example, but this one is so bad that I feel a bit ripped off having only paid 99c.

An editor is credited. Now, I've been an editor, and I know that if you get a truly terrible manuscript and miss 10% of the issues (which is about the average number that you'll miss), it still comes out looking as if it hasn't been edited, because nobody can see what you've fixed. But this one hasn't even been spellchecked. Spellcheck is built into any tool a sensible person would use to write a book. The author could have spellchecked it. But it appears that neither the author nor the editor has done so. Add to that missing commas before terms of address (to me, the clearest mark of an amateur); shonky capitalisation; proper nouns inconsistently spelled; simple punctuation errors like double periods, exclamation mark and period, or no space after a period; apostrophe issues; vocabulary glitches... I spotted over a hundred errors, and I don't usually see more than a couple of dozen in a book this size.

It's bad enough that I'm dinging it a star, even though the story was good and I had no complaints about it. These days, indies just can't get away with being this unprofessional.

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