The Bookseller - Comment - I care about carelessness

The nigh-on omniscient fact checkers at the New Yorker are legendary. Aficionados of their art - and I count myself among them - have long swapped stories about how detailed and dogged they are. But as someone with several decades of experience, both in-house and freelance, working for pretty much all the major trade publishers in the UK in some capacity or another, I must admit I snorted at the idea that we might employ fact checkers for non-fiction titles as a matter of course.

Academic publishing is a different matter, as peer review has long been part of the process, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell any adult non-fiction divisions are budgeting for a fact checker, in addition to a copyeditor and proofreader, when trying to massage the P&Ls into something that might pass muster (unless in exceptional circumstances - Johann Hari being a perfect example of where the cost might well be factored in from the off, given the back-story).