Question about ARCs

[WriterDan]

So on the cover of the ARC that I'm currently reading it says:

Uncorrected Advance Reading Copy -- Not For Sale

And I was wondering how "Uncorrected" the book is.  At what point in the iterative process of editing between publisher and author do ARCs get printed?  Anyone?

[Peter Ahlstrom]

ARCs get printed after the book is copyedited and typeset, but before it gets proofread. How many errors there will be in the ARC depends a lot on the publisher and the author. In the case of THE WAY OF KINGS, there are a TON of errors, though most of them are small errors like missing words or extra words. (And actually there are going to be more errors in the final book than I'm comfortable with, but we worked like crazy and did the best we could in the circumstances.) In an ARC I read of Lois McMaster Bujold's THE CURSE OF CHALION, I found mistakes only on one page. And I'm good at finding mistakes. So it really depends.

[Bookstore Guy]

Pyr's arcs are usually pretty decent (since I know what you are reading).  Though a lot of that has to do with many of their books having already been published in the UK.  I'm not near as good as Peter, but I usually find several misplaced quotes, repeated words, wrong spacing, etc.  But really nothing that is major or a deal breaker.  I'm sure Peter would go through and find way more, but he's trained for it.  I'm just a reviewer. 

[guessingo]

so is proofreader a job at a publishing company? Is it one person per book that does the proofreading at the publisher?

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Usually the proofreading is outsourced. With WAY OF KINGS, due to the time crunch, Tor editor Theresa Nielsen Hayden proofread it.

When I worked at TOKYOPOP we did almost all of the copyediting and proofreading in-house. That's not the case anymore since they laid off so much of the editorial staff.

[guessingo]

so a proofreader is basically an independent contractor. They probably proofread books from several publishers right?  I would think for best selling authors like Brandon they would want multiple proofreaders. Then again I don't know the economics of publishing. Maybe that is too expensive. I would think for a very long book, proofreading would require many sets of eyes.

Proofreaders have to have an incredible attention to detail. I would think that many of the books may not even be enjoyable to them. I could never do that job.

As far as errors in Way of Kings. I am willing to bet that 99% of readers won't notice much of anything. Most of us are fairly casual readers. We are not like Peter who does this for a living or Bookstore guy who reads every SF/F book published.

I have read several hundred novels and non-fiction books. I can only remember noticing a few spelling errors/missing words over the years. I am sure there were more, I just never noticed.

[guessingo]

I just read Brandons blog. It never occurred to me that librarians would get Arcs.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

They have to decide what to buy somehow, like bookstores. Though a lot of librarians just read reviews in things like Library Journal and don't read the books themselves. The conference Brandon went to recently though, ALA, is just for librarians and a ton of ARCs got handed out there.

[guessingo]

It just isn't the kind of thing you think of if you are not in the book business. I had never heard of an ARC until I started reading author blogs in the last year.