KY, you and I have discussed publishing before, but let me just briefly weigh in here.
I write academic books, published by university presses. I have also taught more than my fair share of freshman composition classes, which is a quick and extremely unpleasant way to learn the art of proofreading.
In times past, top academic presses insisted that every book have a line editor go through everything prior to producing galleys, the author had to respond to all line editing, the galleys were sent to the author for review, and then they went back to the regular editing staff for a last check. These days this simply cannot be done. A normal academic book from a top press probably sells 750 copies in the first two years, if it's in a mainstream sort of discipline, and if it ever sells more than 1500 that's fairly remarkable; in times past, you got an extra 500 copies at least just from library purchases. Printing costs, despite technology, have gone up and not down. And what this means is that an academic press runs very, very close to being in the red at all times.
The very first thing you do to cut costs is to insist on professionalism. That's free, it doesn't reduce quality except for people who are unprofessional, and it in no way lowers the press's standards. So what you do is, you send the book to a line editor, the author responds to edits, this produces galleys (these days usually PDF), and these are sent to the author for final review. Full stop. If the author cannot catch his or her own errors, in the original submitted manuscript, the line-edited version, and the galleys, where 99% of the time the error was present from the beginning, then that author isn't being professional about it. We even have an extra mechanism to twist the author's arm: the author produces the index, which means reading the whole darn MS word by word.
What happens is that authors seek subventions to farm out indexing, they blame the publishers for mistakes, and all in all there's this attitude that trivial things like spelling are beneath the concern of a serious scholar. (In case you're wondering, one reason I have managed to develop a positive relationship with a top academic press is that the line editor kind of has to struggle to find errors -- I've done so much proofreading and such that I catch mistakes very, very fast.)
With cookbooks, I think there is the problem that a lot of chefs see it as self-promotion rather than an achievement of its own. This is like scholars who see books as something you write in order to get promotion and fame, not to say anything worth saying or to produce knowledge. In both cases, these authors think proofreading of all kinds is somebody else's problem. I call it unprofessional behavior.
But with reviews, magazine articles, and so on, I really think we're talking about something else. There you simply cannot have any illusions that anybody is going to do deep content editing other than you, the author. You're very much on your own. If I had one thing to say above all else about the reviews here, it's that you've got the very unusual situation that everyone involved is very knowledgeable about the subject, which is emphatically not the case with any other kind of reviewing or criticism of food.
To boil it down radically: Ed's confusing the issue, granted, but you're falling for it.  |