Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be easily rectified if they looked up the words on each side of the hyphen. If they are actual words, then that hyphen should not count. If they are just partial words, then they should. But removing a book from circulation based on an obviously shoddy algorithm should never happen. As a Kindle author myself, I'm having second thoughts about the platform. Censorship by robots isn't exactly an attractive fe…
> If they are actual words, then that hyphen should not count. That would have side-effects e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
161–170 of 186 posts
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#162So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…
Good point, I've caught a few other things that grind my gears. "Are there people out there so fucking mind-bogglingly stupid that the inclusion of a – between two words confuses them enough to be torn from the story and ruin the reading experience so much that they felt obliged to write to Amazon and complain?" I think that the author insulting someone who have paid for his book is not something intelligent, nice or…
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#163When there are discussions about Hachette, one often sees writers saying "Amazon gives me more of the cover price, and gets my book into people's hands faster, what's the downside?" I guess this is the downside.
As someone who has been using a Kindle for almost all my book reading in the last few years, the major publishers don't care. Doesn't matter what I read it tends to have quite a few OCR errors and other mistakes that clearly exist for the print edition (extra hyphens) or 'correcting' things that used to be hyphenated (by removing the hyphen that needs to be there). My new Kindle has the ability to let me report typos…
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#164The big issue here are not the hyphens, other than maintaining formatting for different devices the publisher should not mess with the content after an author approved edit. Traditionally there was the copy editing process done by the publisher, but automating this on a the-customer-is-always-right process would probably have left a lot of hard to digest classics no where to be found. And seriously? Running a work of…
All of your examples relate to the knowing use of, let's say, "flavorful" language. The author's "flavor" appears to be "hyphen-happy" - do you believe his intent was to style his writing that way for dramatic or artistic effect?
Then there were the so called (vanity) self-publishing houses who more or less capitalized on the rejects, while asking for a quite significant amount of money first to print and rudimentary, if at all, edit whatever the author offered. Here the gatekeepeíng factor to the public was how much money you had to spare to get your books printed and listed.
Nowadays with digital publishing the initial production costs are so low, that suddenly copy editing and proofreading by a person other than the author becomes a significant part of the costs, which it wasn't before, since that cost was dwarfed by the actual printing costs and was normally considered a given.
With no money to spare for third-party editors/proofreaders/layout this job is outsourced to algorithms and mechanical Turks with questionable results.
I suggest the best way to improve quality and acceptance of self-published work, is to actually pay a professional third-party person to proofread and copy edit your book first in a joint effort with the author. Only after that you should submit your work to a digital publisher. If amazon then still rejects this, based on customer complaints than we have an actual problem at hand which is not just the absence of any kind of human copy editing.
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Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. — Mark Twain
https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=editor&search_type=quotes
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#165So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…
The preview of Moonstruck (the book in question) is also available through Amazon. Here are the first few hypens I can see: "There could be no-one there, ..." "...into a razor-filled muzzle ..." "... sleep, muscular, brown-furred monster." "... through her blood-soaked fur." "... propelled backwards in mid-leap, ..." "... the red-haired woman ..." "... a tall, grey-haired man ..." "mid-thirties" "mother-in-law" Not m…
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The writer is no James Joyce.
That's a really poor response. When Joyce published his first novel as a nobody, people like you would've said something equally thoughtless about his grammar, followed up by a glib "the writer is no Arthur Conan Doyle."
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#167It's unfortunate, because authors do deserve better, and they'll understandably be upset when they're routed to a malfunctioning robot. But if the problem is too many authors and not enough support staff, maybe the real question is: does self-publishing scale?
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#168http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2012/06/27/the-legend-of-...
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#169Seems like most people in the thread are missing that this started with at least one actual reader complaint, and automation was only run over the book to verify. The author of the blog says there are only one complaint, but given the rather craptastic grammar examples posted and the vitriolic stance of the author, I'm not so sure. Also worth noting that the "automation" was a spell checker, which presumably flagged…
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have edited my comment to make it clearer that you weren't replying to anything I actually said. Hope that helps.
I was replying to what you said. His hyperbole regarding unintelligent customers was the behavior that was called out as not nice, professional or intelligent. His piss-poor use of hyphens (see what I did there?), however, isn't hyperbole. Hyperbole is a rhetorical device (and the greatest thing ever!), and unless he intended to evoke an emotional response in his readers by their incorrect and non-poetic application,…