| More physical things that can annoy me |
[Jul. 15th, 2010|01:14 pm]
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ARCs with faint print, which I used to see from one publisher in particular. I think it might have been a cost-thing.
ARCs or manuscripts with tiny, eye-painy print.
ARCs or manuscripts with tiny, eye-painy print whose pages have print on one side only. That has to be a deliberate taunt on the part of whoever prepared the MS. "Ha ha ha, we had room to use large print BUT WE DIDN'T!" On a related note, ARCs or manuscripts with a small island of dense, small print in a sea of blank paper. You can't see but I'm making a one-fingered mudra of disdain in the direction of the people responsible for that idea.
I'm actually fairly open-minded about fonts, probably because nobody out there would ever send out an MS in comic sans or Viner Hand. Or Deutsch Gothic. OK, I might accept the last for a WK40K novel. |
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| Hrm |
[Jul. 15th, 2010|03:55 am]
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Perhaps I should post to this more often. |
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| Calibration |
[Sep. 2nd, 2007|02:45 pm]
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Has anyone else had a problem with ARCs having print that is too faint to read comfortably? I'm trying to work out if this is really the problem that I think it is or if I'm just going blinder with age.
I'm pretty sure it is a real problem, because the manuscripts I get are nice and dark. |
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| Right of reply |
[Aug. 30th, 2007|08:09 pm]
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Should reviewers give authors a right of reply to reviews?
If yes, should authors use that right of reply, or is the potential for ugly dramatics too high?
I lean towards "yes" and "no", which now that I look at it is terribly convenient from the perspective of a reviewer. Also, if I really do believe that enough author/reviewer interactions end badly to be worth discouraging the practice, allowing them a right of reply is a fairly unkind action on my part. |
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| what is the minimum one should reasonably be able to expect from a reviewer? |
[Aug. 30th, 2007|07:37 pm]
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Stolen from an old post of mine:
1: The reviewer will have read the book that they are reviewing and will review that book, not an entirely different version that they may have dreamed up after a visit from Jacob Marley [1].
1a: Reviewing a book in terms of how it isn't the book you were hoping it would be but rather the book that the author actually wanted to write is probably a bad idea. Examples might be a recent book where I hoped I was going to get a book about a rock band but got something else instead. The book was supposed to be about something else and my expectations were inaccurate.
2: It's probably best if the reviewer has no strong opinions about the author (or anyone else involved in the production of the book) one way or another. At the least, to be aware of them so that you can compensate.
There's a bit in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy about not allowing flaws to prevent someone's virtues from being rewarded and not allowing virtures to deter one from punishing transgressions that might apply here. Actually, I am not totally sure he said the first half. It's been a long time since I read Discourses.
3: There's nothing wrong with having preferences but those preferences do not constitute natural law. |
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reviewers_rant