Divine Misdemeanors ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

[shalotts-lady.livejournal.com]

Just as an FYI maybe to spur some discussion LKH announced this on her twitter,

10/8/09 4:29pm: Divine Misdemeanors which is the 8th Merry Gentry book comes out December 8th, I believe, or within days of that. Not long to wait

And all afternoon she's been tweeting about her sex scenes between Kitto, Mistral, and Merry. So she's still not done. Does this mean that she doesn't get her books edited? I mean, is that even allowed? Do real publishing houses let their "powerhouse" authors just release it straight to book?

I'm pretty much appalled.

Comments

[eve-from-oz.livejournal.com]

I'll be the first to admit that I know nothing about the publishing industry but I recall author whose webpage i used to read occassionally talking about sending it off to the editor/publisher people at least 6 months (maybe longer) before it was published!

I'm very interested ina nswers from people who know how the business works and I'm sure we're all dying to know what makes LKH so special!

[rosencrantz23.livejournal.com]

There are two basic rules of publishing involved here:

1. the closer to the *printing* deadline you submit your manuscript, the less it'll be line- or copy-edited or proofread.


2. the more money an author generates for his or her publisher, the less chance an editor will really alter the manuscript

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

The printing deadline has already passed. Both the ordinary print deadline (6 months pre-drop) and the special snowflake print deadline (3 months pre-drop).

Also, Merry isn't the huge seller than Anita is. If this were an Anita book, it might seem worth all the shenanigans, but I can't imagine anyone at Ballantine (i.e., Random House, i.e., Bertelsmann Media Group) is anything other than filled with rage right now.

Remember that LKH has been ignoring this book and working on Anita properties, according to her own blog, which must be pissing off the folks at BMG no end: she's basically doing work for their hated rival Penguin on what should be BMG's time.

re: the "divine misfire"

[cherose228.livejournal.com]

Hi, all:

WHY are you surprized at her shenanigans? She has missed the deadline for turn in on every book since NiC.

As for why she's so special: BOOK SALES.

-,'-,'-,'--@

Re: the "divine misfire"

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

WHY are you surprized at her shenanigans? She has missed the deadline for turn in on every book since NiC.

She has missed five or six deadlines on this one book already, though.

Re: the "divine misfire"

[cherose228.livejournal.com]

Hi:

so? Just means that this one is a worse mess than the last one.

-,'-,'-,'--@

[briarwood.livejournal.com]

It's pretty darn obvious that her books don't get properly edited. Hell, in one of the early Merry books her insert note was printed: neither LKH nor her editor had noticed that she hadn't bothered to replace "insert" with whatever was meant to be there!

And that's before you get to all the dreadful grammar and plot stuff that makes no sense...which a halfway decent editor would catch.

[clover-elf-kin.livejournal.com]

...happen to remember which? This I gotta see!

[missingvolume.livejournal.com]

I think at this point we almost need a tag to go over how long or short a print cycle can be.

[shadwing.livejournal.com]

6-8 Weeks it was stated in an earlier flogging.

So this book needs to be completed this month in order to make the December drop date. Still taking bets on if that'll happen if it does this book will be an utter trainwreck and mess

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

What real publishing houses let their authors get away with is in direct correlation to the amount of money they make off that author. As long as people are buying the books in large quantities, the publisher doesn't care. Yes, that author might eventually ruin their career, but publishers know there is another right around the corner they can exploit for cash.

[ellenel13.livejournal.com]

Isn't Kitto the one who's like physically a kid??? Why is there sex with him why?

[eldestmuse.livejournal.com]

he's an emotionally dependent physically stunted goblin, yes.
and I don't know but I wish it would stop :(

[alex-lebeau.livejournal.com]

If she can justify sex with Peter, a sexually traumatized underage boy, and Nathan, a sexually traumatized man who acts like a boy, why is this even a surprise anymore?

[denelian.livejournal.com]

in all fairness (and i don't really want to) no, Kitto is *not* physically a kid, nor does he look like a child. he *LOOKS* like a shorter than Merry man, fully grown but like 4 feet and change. very short. and, i grant, very PTSD-level-of-trama. but he is both an actual man and well over a thousand years old.

i honestly think the issue just comes from his size and how totally, erm... submissive? as in beat-the-fuck-down-and-broken-submissive he is. it squicks me out not because he is in any way actually immature, but because as he his now, he is so messed up that i don't think he is truly capable of consent in any meaningful context. he was trained, for over a thousand years, to put out on demand. there's no real way that he knows how to say no.

[othellia.livejournal.com]

This is the most beautiful trainwreck EVER. Well... not ever, but it's probably in the top ten.

[sehkmetschild.livejournal.com]

LKH is the cash cow (or one of them) and a lot of editors start to worry that if the author gets big enough, they can't cross them because the author may leave and take millions of consumers with them. I do think she needs more editing, to tell the truth. Someone needs to tell her "no".

[fishsanwitt]

I don't think anyone will ever say 'no' to her.

And I'm appalled that she actually has sex with Peter. I read the book (with Edward and Donna?) although I can no longer remember the title. Why on God's green earth would she have sex with him? Oy.

[whispertwistair.livejournal.com]

Anita has not had sex with Peter.

[xarra.livejournal.com]

My book went from contract to print in 2 months. However it's a) a photobook b) I had to proof all the captions which weren't that big...

I'll be surpised if she gets it out in time tbh...

[flirtswithfan.livejournal.com]

She is already trying to CYA over the release date. That "or within days" is lkh-speak for maybe I'll get it done on time or maybe not if it interferes with my life. Though this morning she tweets that at about 4am she outlined the end of the book.

[libwitch.livejournal.com]

I remember reading far back that she pretty much doesn't use an editor anymore. her choice - and I remember that being said at about the same time her writing really started going downhill in terms of sentence structure and grammar. I am not sure though, if that was just rumor or truth.

That said, some pretty big authors have pretty fast turn around time from finishing a book to getting it on the shelf, especially when you consider how many copies get printed (I am thinking, for example JKR or the George RR Martin Song of Ice and Fire series, which often hits the shelves within a few months of him finishing it); however, those authors also spend considerable more time writing and proofreading the books to begin with AND their publishers also have people working like mad to edit and copyedit them to get them to press.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

some pretty big authors have pretty fast turn around time from finishing a book to getting it on the shelf

Yes, but "fast time" with this stuff is three or four months after completion of the final draft of the manuscript, not less than two months after completion of the first draft. She's not even done yet.

If she were magically done tomorrow, the book would still have to go out on December 8 without getting a single pre-publication review in any major review publication, because those have already assigned all of their November and December titles for review.

She's not even done with the first draft of the manuscript and the completed, bound Advance Review Copies should have gone out weeks ago.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I think they just haven't told her that it's not going to go December 8, because otherwise she'll never finish it.

I honestly don't see how they can do it, just physically, at this point. Remember, this is Merry, not Anita--it's not as big a seller, so the likelihood that they'll do a Watergate Transcripts-style rush job is less.

They couldn't move the Ted Kennedy book forward by a few weeks, even though they tried. Publishing is a giant ship that doesn't turn on a dime.

[cryptaknight.livejournal.com]

EWWWWWW KITTO.

Sorry. Anyway. I find it hard to believe her books are edited, considering the number of basic spelling/grammar/capitalization/punctuation errors I find in them, to say nothing of continuity errors or things like giving two fae characters the same name. Sometimes I am tempted to buy a copy, go through it with my red pen, and send it back to her publisher. But I don't really want to spend money on her books.