Canadian spelling vs. American spelling

Sakura-chan said:

Hi (said glumly).
I was recently asked to send a partial and did so happily. It was a few days before I remembered that I had used Canadian spelling throughout my manuscript and the agent I sent it to was from the US. Will this be held against me?

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Assuming it's a good agent, no. I didn't even change from UK to US spellings when I was submitting directly to publishers. I only changed to US spellings once I'd sold the books to a US publisher.

Yeah, seriously, that is so not something to worry about. If the agent is worth her/his salt, he/she won't care at all.

Not even a tiny issue.

Everyone knows UK/Canadians spell funny

Seriously, this is so tiny an issue that publishers who "do" a British edition and a US edition have custom macros written to do the spelling and punctuation changes.

Medievalist said:

Seriously, this is so tiny an issue that publishers who "do" a British edition and a US edition have custom macros written to do the spelling and punctuation changes.

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That's what my US editor told me. HA! My galleys on book one were so messed up it was silly. Took me about five extra hours just looking for the spelling and punctuation changes they missed.

So for book two (which was already written at that point), I ran my own series of search-and-replaces in Word to fix it. Took less than one-half hour. (Okay, if I were actually a techie person like, say, Medievalist, I would've written the macos myself. But I ain't. )

For books three and four, I wrote in American English from the outset.

It helps that I'm American so know American English. If I weren't, I'd let the publisher do it.

Hey! Does this mean I'm not as sadly monolingual as I claim to be? I know both British and American English! Maybe I'm bilingual, after all. (With apologies to those who really ARE bilingual.)

(Oh, and yes, I know that the major publishers really do have those macros/scripts. But if my publisher had them, the production folks apparently didn't know. Sigh.)

Terie said:

That's what my US editor told me. HA! My galleys on book one were so messed up it was silly. Took me about five extra hours just looking for the spelling and punctuation changes they missed.)

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Yeah, that's because they didn't hire me to write the macros!

For a good publisher with a budget for stuff like this (and large print runs), they run several small scripts to fix specific things, then give a proofer hard copy--and the proofer is someone with particular expertise in localization.

Medievalist said:

and the proofer is someone with particular expertise in localization.

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I believe you meant 'localisation', didn't you? (grins, ducks, runs)

Funny enough (and possibly because my first book was in the launch of a new imprint and I had the feeling that they did actually use a certain number of new hires in addition to staff from the mother ship), but I have more layout and grammar knowledge than my copyeditor, proofreader, and typesetter. Made for an, er, interesting exchange of e-mails with my editor once I got the hardcopy book in hand. He actually had to go down to the production area and explain to them that you don't use widow and orphan control in novels! LOL! (It hadn't occurred to me that a professional typesetter wouldn't know that, so I didn't look at the number of lines on each page in the galleys.)

What's making me weep currently are the problems I'm seeing in ebooks that were "converted" from the files used to make the printed edition.

Lots and lots of errors.

Medievalist said:

What's making me weep currently are the problems I'm seeing in ebooks that were "converted" from the files used to make the printed edition.

Lots and lots of errors.

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Yeah. See, while I have an extensive background in information design, I don't have any in e-book technology, so I wouldn't even think about putting out my own e-book right now without doing a shedload of research on design first. Not that I intend to self-publish anyway. Still. I have considerably more background than a lot of people doing this (whether self-pub or commercial publishers shoving the stuff out there willy-nilly). Maybe that's where the difference lies: I have enough knowledge to know what I don't know. (At the risk of sound Rumsfeld-ish.)