Let’s get to the last of your questions.
From Henry Cruz: “What do you think of Amazon’s Kindle book reader?”
Anything that gets my books into readers’ hands is A-okay with me.
From Susan: “Generally (or even specifically) what’s the difference between the UK and US editions of your books? Is it more than just spelling, punctuation(,) and the Oxford/Harvard Comma? Commonly used words? Threatened Title Changes, like Philsopher vs. Sorcerer?”
There’s almost no difference between the UK and US editions of my books. I was published in the UK before anywhere else, and one of the first things my editor at Hodder & Stoughton, Sue Fletcher, told me was that she would not anglicize my spelling or vocabulary. I’m an American, and they were going to publish me as an American writer. So my British editions are free of extraneous U’s. And they don’t contain tyres, kerbs, jewellery, or politicians holding surgeries in their constituencies. They do contain British punctuation. When the U.S. editions of the Evan Delaney novels were being edited, the American copyeditors went a bit berserk changing commas, dashes, semi-colons, and capitalization.
And at my own instigation, the US editions have a few minor changes — to update chronology or to improve dialogue that I thought needed sprucing up. But overall the UK and US editions are the same.
In the upcoming Antarctic edition, however, Evan is a vampire hunter and Jesse Blackburn is immortal. And can fly. And has brown eyes.
No, not really. His eyes are blue.
From DJ: (regarding the methods editors employ to keep authors in line) “I always thought the cattle prods were mere rumour.”
It’s spelled rumor, DJ.
4 responses so far ↓
djpaterson // October 18, 2008 at 7:35 pm |
That Noah Webster was a real card.
But lazy, lazy, lazy. Takes a fraction of a second to write a ‘u’.
And don’t you mean ‘anglicise’ and ‘capitalisation’?
Patti // October 20, 2008 at 11:42 am |
Extraneous? I think not, good neighbour.
Meg // October 20, 2008 at 11:49 am |
Patti, I’m a vowel conservationist. But I’m happy that Canada is large enough to let the U’s roam free.
Patti // October 20, 2008 at 8:41 pm |
We have to do something with that frozen expanse and the environmental footprint of the “u” is negligible. I think. Are the British and American versions of your books in the same type? I’m sitting here wondering if the unconserved “u”s make a difference in the length of the book. Beware, it’s the end of a heavy teaching day and measurement of the number of trees consumed by orthography seems like a valid question to answer.