Editing, Phoenix style

The question of editing at Phoenix Fire publishing has been brought up once or twice. Who does it? Is it any good?
I think we have our answer.

I give you Wolf Mate, book one in the I am Wolf series by Karrye Angello. Published by Phoenix Fire on May 17, 2013.
For the purpose of exposing questionable editorial and publishing practices, here are a few screen caps from her book on Kindle. In each, there are instances of editorial strike-throughs that were left in the book when it went to publication.
Be warned: There are graphic sexual references.

Don’t take my word for it. You can visit the link above and glance at the “Look inside” feature to see some of them for yourself.

There are more I could add, but I think these speak pretty plainly.

This brings up some pretty important questions.
First, did the publisher (Tabetha) not even read this book before she pushed it through to publication? If she had, there’s at least some chance that she would have caught not only the corrections that were made, but also some of the many more that needed to be done. Nope. What it looks like is that she got the file back from the editor and put it straight on Createspace without any review at all. If the publisher isn’t even going to read the book, what’s the point of having one? An author can have a book edited and put it on Createspace themselves, if that’s all a publisher’s going to do.

Second, is that how editing is done at Phoenix Fire? Striking through errors and putting the new version next to it? I don’t know about the rest of the authors out there, but I’ve never seen it done that way professionally. Anybody else?

Third, is that what passes for editing at Phoenix Fire? Half a dozen corrections in the entire book? It was uncomfortable enough to read the content (generic smut is not my thing. Sorry), but even more painful was the screamingly obvious lack of proper editing. There are examples on every page where an editor worth his or her salt would have made corrections, including double-spacing between words, subject-verb agreement and run-on sentences, to name just a few.

I’m not doing this to rag on the author. She’s not responsible for the mistakes that make it to print. It’s her job to write the book and give it to the publisher. She did that.
And I’m not even ragging on the editor, as such. Unless they’re properly trained and educated for it, the other authors at Phoenix Fire are not qualified to edit books. They might have the best intentions, but they just aren’t professional editors. Using them to do the job might show poor judgement on their part for being a party to it, but more than that, it shows that Tabetha’s just looking for another way to get over. Using other authors to edit books and offering them higher royalties looks like Tabetha’s way of trying to get around withholding or paying taxes. It’s also a way for her to get cheap, if not free labor out of them, because those royalties probably aren’t being properly paid out anyway. If those authors being used for editing PF books are willing to believe that they’re getting a fair deal out of their Boss Lady, more power to ’em. But as it relates to a publishing company being properly run, it shows serious doubts about questionable business practices.

That book’s been on the market for almost a year, and nobody at the company has caught the errors that got published. Not the author, the editor, and not the one person that’s responsible for how the book is presented to the public: the publisher. Tabetha Jones.

The real question is why any author that’s serious about his or her craft would want to be involved with a publisher that isn’t upstanding on every level, straight across the board. Who wants even a hint of impropriety associated with their work, especially as it relates to finances and editing?  I know I wouldn’t, and neither would any serious author I know of.