Here's a curious little story that came out last night. Jonathan Franzen's <em>Freedom</em>, modestly touted as 'the book of the century so far', is about to be pulped and reissued in the UK. Why? Because, according to Franzen, the publisher, HarperCollins, mistakenly used an old draft of his computer file for printing, not his finished, revised one.

How the hell can things like this happen? Good question. <!--more-->I can only speak from my own experience. Here it is. I have two different publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Both tend to edit and revise separately. This means that the versions of my books you see will differ. Usually this is slight -- to do with spelling and language issues. Occasionally it goes further.

<em>The Blue Demon</em>, for example, is known as <em>City of Fear</em> in the US, for example. <em>The Seventh Sacrament</em> has a different sequence of the same opening scenes in the US, because my editor over there thought US readers needed something different. The historical sections of that book and <em>Lucifer's Shadow </em>(which is now <em>The Cemetery of Secrets </em>in the UK) are also printed entirely in italics in the US (which I hate, not that it made any difference).

Leaving all the contextual stuff to one side what these slight differences mean is this: authors, to be on the safe side, have to proof read the final galleys of both editions, even though they're in the same language.

I didn't know this. No one told me. I discovered it the hard way when something crept into an edition I simply didn't recognise. After that I've always asked to see all English language galleys before publication (obviously I can't make any meaningful comment on foreign editions).

Why would an author not wish to do this? Because it's additional work, lots of it, time-consuming and tedious. By this stage I've probably read, word by word, line by line, this damned thing six or seven times. I am blind to its faults. I often cannot see even the most obvious of errors. But I do know what I was trying to do, and if the typesetting is based on an earlier revise I surely would have spotted it.

What happened with Franzen? I've no idea. But I can see how slips like this get through. Readers simply do not appreciate the amount of post-delivery work that goes into getting a book into print. All those self-published authors out there who simply upload a file to Lulu or Smashwords or wherever don't either. Conventional publishing is a drawn-out process, involving several different steps and a number of different people, most of whom you will know only by email if at all.

It only takes one of those steps to fail for the most horrendous of consequences to follow.
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