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Reading preview of a self pub book. A fair few spelling/grammar/word choice errors, which I get, costs and all, but it's offputting in a sample. Tsk. Then I looked at the sample of a book published by Bloomsbury and it had a catastrophic punctuation fail *in the first line*.

may I add, the Bloomsbury error was that commas had been inserted in a way that looked right for the sentence but completely borked the meaning. Very much as would be done by someone clicking rapidly through a spellcheck.

I have quite strong feelings on publishers taking 92.5% on paperbacks and 75% on ebooks and not actually providing a competent human editor. And I think an additional factor in the great GenAI discussion is that if you're going to provide less of a service you shouldn't expect to take the same cut.

I recently declined to blurb an ARC from the same imprint because it was so unedited. Not "spelling mistake" level, but "wrong word or terrible grammar renders sentence meaningless" level. this is not in any way okay from a publisher and we should push back.