Do You Fact Check Everything You Read in a Book
When I set out to write my commencement book, I wanted to write a book that examined the very nature of facts and how nosotros turn them into stories. To practice this, I knew, I would have to get every fact that was verifiable correct. The more than you desire to ask the big, shifty questions, the more than your foundation must be stone solid.
My book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, concerns the deaths of two people who have many living family members, the incarceration of a living man, and a protracted emotional and social trauma of enormous meaning to a great many real and living people in a region with enormous (rightful) distrust of media and journalists. I'd done my best to get the facts correct every bit I wrote, but I had thousands of pages of archival documents, photos, trial transcripts, and newspaper clippings, every bit well as hours of interviews. The text had been through likewise many revisions, both big and sentence-level, for me to count. In quiet moments, I felt the anxiety of getting something wrong grip my stomach. I could hurt someone, open myself up to lawsuits, or just make a reader lose confidence in everything I had to say. Getting my book fact checked was not optional.
Fact checking is a comprehensive procedure in which, according to the definitive book on the subject, a trained checker does the following: "Read for accuracy"; "Research the facts"; "Appraise sources: people, newspapers and magazines, books, the Internet, etc"; "Check quotations"; and "Wait out for and avoid plagiarism." Though I had worked as a fact checker in two small newsrooms, did I trust myself to do the exhaustive and detailed piece of work of checking my ain nonfiction volume? I did not.
From reading up on the subject and talking to friends who had published books of nonfiction, I knew that I would be responsible for hiring and paying a freelance fact checker myself. This is the norm, non the exception; in almost all book contracts, information technology is the writer's legal responsibility, non the publisher's, to deliver a factually accurate text.
As a result, most nonfiction books are not fact checked; if they are, it is at the author'south expense. Publishers have said for years that it would be price-prohibitive for them to provide fact checking for every nonfiction volume; they tend to speak publicly well-nigh a book's facts only if a book includes errors that pb to a public scandal and threaten their lesser line. Recent controversies over books containing factual errors by Jill Abramson, Naomi Wolf, and, further back, James Frey, come to mind.
Editors who acquire nonfiction books and piece of work closely with authors subscribe to ideas of factual accuracy, but are commonly not trained journalists, meaning that they might exist unfamiliar with the fundamentals of reporting and fact checking (there are some exceptions to this norm, including recently named publisher of Simon & Schuster and former New York Times writer Dana Canedy). Despite the common sense idea that books are the longer and more permanent version of magazine articles, there is an informal division of church and state between the worlds of book publishing and mag journalism. The latter is subjected to rigorous fact checking, while the erstwhile is not.
There are some reasons for this, including that authors of books are more than typically considered experts on their material, while a journalist writing a single commodity on a topic may non be held to that same standard. Further, magazines typically own the copyright to all pieces they publish, while a volume'south copyright remains with the author. All of this contributes to the sense that the mag is responsible for the accuracy of the words published in their pages, while for a book, it'due south the writer.
A spokesperson for Hachette Book Group, one of the "Big V" publishing houses and the publisher of my book, shared this statement with me: "We do have procedures in place to ensure that certain nonfiction books and some fiction books are vetted for libel and other legal issues. Relevant facts may be reviewed during the vetting process as necessary." But ultimately, the spokesperson emphasized, "The responsibility for the accuracy of the text does residue on the author; we practice rely on their expertise or enquiry for accuracy." (Inquiries to Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan went unanswered).
Even so readers and some editors often mistakenly believe that the fact checking of nonfiction books happens somewhere in the typical copyediting procedure, and in the case of more news-heavy or potentially controversial books, the legal process. But this is not so. These processes may catch contradictions of appointment and flavour, name misspellings, or, depending on the copyeditor, glaring errors in research, simply they are fundamentally designed to make sure that the book is readable and won't open the publisher upward to lawsuits—not to ensure rigorous accurateness.
At present that the dust has settled and my book has come out, I've become curious about whether my feel was typical of nonfiction writers struggling to detect a pathway for the fact checking of their books. What I learned fabricated me both more hopeful for the future of fact checking and angrier near the ways that the electric current publishing mural keeps both writers and fact checkers disempowered.
Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, bought my volume in Oct 2017. They paid me $l,000 in the get-go of iii installments constituting an advance against royalties. That showtime payment netted to around $29,000 afterwards agent commission and taxes. This coin was supposed to cover the toll of the time it would take me to write the book, equally well as all additional research and reporting—to say null of the years of research and reporting conducted on my own dime earlier the book's auction. I spent about $2,500 on the trial transcript of the case spotlighted in my book, and near $2,000 on travel and reporting. I accept no children or developed dependents, and I am in reasonably good health without major medical bills, so I was able to live relatively frugally on the remainder during the menses between sale and "delivery" of the completed manuscript to my editor.
My contract stipulated, "The Writer warrants, represents and covenants... all statements independent in the Work as published are true or based on reasonable research for accuracy," and that my book could not plagiarize any other work, "or give rise to a claim of libel or defamation, or invasion of the rights of privacy or of publicity of any political party, or violate any constabulary or regulation." My wonderful editor at Hachette understood from the commencement that information technology was my intention to become the book fact checked, but confirmed to me that I would have to pay for the checker myself; a legal read to protect Hachette and I from potential lawsuits would, still, be covered.
I had no idea how much money to set aside for a fact checker, so when the time arrived to hire one, I had only a few chiliad dollars left. I crossed my fingers that information technology would exist enough. I had worked with a diligent fact checker on a long and convoluted magazine slice; I arranged for her to bank check my book for about $three,000. My editor gave me every bit much clarity and notice equally he could, yet it was apparent to me that there wasn't a clear or clean place for fact-checking in the editorial process. Deadlines often changed, and things were on a tight borderline to get advance copies of my volume ready for Book Expo of America. Only every bit we entered the small window within which my editor had told me we needed to fact check and then as not to filibuster the book'due south publicity plan, the fact checker I had hired needed to bow out of the project. I turned to acquaintances and to Twitter.
I received about thirty quotes from freelance fact checkers, most of them young reporters who did freelance fact checking on the side to proceeds experience and to pay the bills, also as a few more experienced checkers who had worked for magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Some gave me payment quotes past the 60 minutes, and others by lump sum. My book was 110K words, about a third of which were memoir and near ii-thirds of which were heavily reported material with all-encompassing interviews and archival material. The quotes to check it ranged from $1,500 to $twenty,000. Ultimately, I chose a very capable immature journalist and freelance fact checker named Maia Hibbett, who had merely gone through the The Nation's renowned fact-checking internship program and was interested in the subject field matter of my book. I paid her $4,000 in three installments to cheque my book in about six weeks.
Hibbett was excellent—and she found mistakes. Lots of them. A few examples: using more updated demography information than had been bachelor when I started writing the book, she corrected 24,170 square miles that brand up Westward Virginia to 24,230. She inserted the word "before" into the sentence "Pocket-size-scale coal mining had been happening sustainably in pockets of the state since before the Civil State of war," noting in the margin that the coal manufacture in West Virginia was active by 1840. She pointed out that a quote I attributed to a police statement was non ever written down, but said in court. And on and on. But not merely minor errors—also major errors in timeline, law, and geography. She pointed out mistakes in my presentation of cause and effect, and in my logic of interpreting the meaning of events and statements. "The larger the mistake," the writer Susannah Cahalan told me, "the harder information technology is for the writer to come across it."
Hibbett and I talked on the phone every day at the tiptop of the fact check. I talked to her while driving, while grocery shopping, while visiting my parents. In that location is no infinite in my life that that fact check did not touch on. I call up very clearly that by the last week of the process, I would sit in my kitchen with her on speaker phone, my brow downward on the table, responding to her questions for three or four hours. Every author who has ever been through a rigorous fact check knows that it is equally awful as it is wonderful, as listen-canceling as it is comforting—a thing that you lot do because it is essential not simply to make the slice truthful, just to make it good. The Third Rainbow Daughter was immeasurably improved past this process; without information technology, I would have written a substantially different book.
The copyediting and legal vetting processes (with professionals hired past Hachette) ended up occurring at more or less the same fourth dimension as the contained fact checking process during the calendar month of February 2019. In the finish, I was able to input fact checking changes into the clean chief manuscript that was sent to the copyeditor, but information technology was not always clear if that would be possible. Reduced bound manuscripts, an fifty-fifty before version of an ARC, were sent out using the united nations-fact checked version.
After calling and emailing people I knew—almost exclusively women, for whatever that's worth—who had published a book of nonfiction in the concluding 5 years, what became immediately and abundantly clear to me is that every writer's experience was absolutely distinct and substantively unique.
There is no industry standard for which books get fact checked—the ones that are checked go checked because someone (most always the author) cared a more average amount nigh the truth. There is no industry standard for what information technology means for a book to exist "fact checked." There is no industry standard for where the fact cheque should go in the product process of a book. And finally, there is no industry standard for how to rent a fact checker, nor how she should be paid or by whom, nor what should happen if the fact checker's piece of work isn't expert quality or the writer refuses to pay for work already completed.
Of the 18 authors I spoke to, half had not hired a fact checker, but had instead relied on some combination of their own diligence, their publisher's copy editing process and/or legal vetting process, as well equally correcting mistakes in the paperback brought to their attention past readers of the hardback.
Literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb cites money as the main reason writers decline to fact bank check their books. My enquiry suggests that this is partly true, but not the whole story. I spoke to writers publishing across the genres of memoir, essays, cultural criticism, and reported nonfiction; their reasons for not hiring a checker broke down along lines of both money and publishing experience. Regardless of genre, all of those who did not hire a checker were debut authors publishing their first book, or those who could not afford to pay a checker due to the size of their advance or other reasonable financial reasons—moving, illness in the family, a child's school costs, etc.
4 authors I spoke to had, like me, hired a freelance fact checker to check their books either in whole or in role. 3 of them institute their ain fact checkers, agreed on a rate, and paid their checkers straight without any assistance from their publisher. These fact checkers charged a fee ranging between $27-$45 an 60 minutes, or a apartment rate of $2,000 to $10,000 depending on the volume'due south length, the checker's experience, and the density of the reporting. $eight,000-10,000 seems to be the going charge per unit for a thorough and complete check by a checker who has previously checked a book published past a Large Five publishing house; this rate goes down to $3,000-5,000 for a younger checker working more than collaboratively with the writer.
All of the authors who hired their own checkers had informal conversations with their checkers near whether or not to phone call sources or check quotes against recordings, as well every bit what kinds of facts to focus on checking. That said, well-nigh of these authors (including me) did not sign any formal contract or written certificate with their checker.
1 of the authors I spoke to, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, hired a fact checker recommended to her publisher by some other of their authors at an agreed-upon rate of $five,000.
"It looked pretty good when it first came back to me, just then I started noticing some things that I had corrected earlier, which she had inverse to incorrect things," the author told me by email. "Or I noticed that she had caught some errors, but she had corrected them in a way that was still incorrect. And she didn't brand any notes virtually how she had sourced her corrections, so it was almost impossible for me to retrace her steps. And then there were all these things I'd specifically asked her to check, which she completely skipped over. It was a full mess."
In the end, she paid the checker a impale fee of $3,000. "And then I spent v weeks nonstop fact checking the entire book myself," she said. "Fact checking was unexpectedly the virtually stressful role of the whole book process."
Only one author I spoke to had signed a contract with her checker, which she shared with me; it stipulated how either party could terminate the agreement and how much the checker would be paid if either party terminated the agreement. It did not establish a clear standard for the checker, nor clear consequences if the checker failed to deliver the services or failed to deliver the completed check on time.
Surprisingly and chiefly, five authors I spoke to told me that their publishers had indeed paid for fact checking on their books. One of those authors published with Graywolf Press, a small printing founded in 1974 and based in Minneapolis. The writer didn't request fact checking, but was told by her editor, Steve Woodward, that the book would be reviewed past a professional copyeditor also trained in fact checking.
"That's the standard process we utilize for our nonfiction books," says Woodward. "We don't ordinarily rent split up fact-checkers, only combine the process with copyediting, which helps streamline things, and nosotros cistron that into the cost." (Graywolf typically offers significantly smaller advances than the Big V publishing groups).
Some other of the authors I spoke with is published by Bold Blazon Books (formerly Nation Books). Established in 2000, Assuming Type Books is a joint project of the media nonprofit Blazon Media Center (formerly The Nation Institute) and Hachette Volume Grouping.
"A few years agone, subsequently conversations with our CEO, Taya Kitman, we instituted a policy that everything that came out of our shop should be fact checked," says Katy O'Donnell, a Senior Editor at Assuming Blazon. (A Hachette Book Grouping spokesperson notes that O'Donnell is employed by Type Media Middle, not HBG). This change came about, she says, "partly considering of public scandals and partly because of the rigorous process that all of the projects that come out of our nonprofit undergo."
All reported books published past Assuming Type are fact checked, says O'Donnell, besides every bit some of the memoirs, merely they hope to be fact checking 100 percent of their titles, including all memoirs as well as books of history, by next yr. Recently, Assuming Type editor Remy Cawley snagged author Lyz Lenz'southward second book, Belabored, as well as books past Marie Claire writer Chloe Angyal and queer sportswriter Britni de la Cretaz.
"Our book went to auction and we got five offers," says Cretaz. "That they offer fact checking was i of the major deciding factors in signing with Bold Type."
O'Donnell says that Assuming Type typically uses fact checkers who have completed Type Media Center's internship program, which includes grueling fact-checking preparation. Bold Type hires the fact checker and pays them directly, pregnant that no money passes through the writer's easily; the author is also not direct in bear upon with the fact checker. However, this practice is not officially written into the Assuming Type author contract, a Assuming Type author shared with me.
"If we tin can, we do the fact check before the manuscript goes to the copyeditor," says O'Donnell. "But that requires authors and editors to be on fourth dimension. Well-nigh of the time it ends up being simultaneous with copyediting."
O'Donnell told me that the funding for fact checking is possible considering Blazon Media Center's board and donors believe in the importance of facts and investigative journalism. Assuming Blazon is currently working on a fact checking manual to exist shared with their fact checkers and authors, says O'Donnell.
"Fact checkers don't always know what is expected from a book fact check. At that place isn't a clear fix of standards," O'Donnell says. This guide would "become an in-house manual for fact checking in the aforementioned fashion that each publishing house has its own style guide for copyedits."
On the opposite finish of the spectrum for publishers offering fact checking services lies the two original content imprints at corporate behemoth Amazon: Little A and Audible. Like Bold Type, Piffling A hires and pays the fact checker, while authors receive fact check edits simultaneously with re-create edits. In 2018, in an anarchistic motion, Aural began acquiring the audio rights to the works of prominent nonfiction writers like Michael Lewis and Ada Calhoun. The goal was to produce sound books that would drop in advance of their hardback counterparts. Calhoun told me that Audible suggested and paid for the fact checking of her book; it's no surprise that Amazon has the coin.
In the realm of more traditional volume publishing, Tim Duggan Books, a prestigious boutique imprint of Penguin Random House, distinguished itself by publishing rigorously reported nonfiction, with fact checking included. By all accounts, Tim Duggan Books, established in 2014, was an experiment to see if a Big Five literary imprint could conceivably brand in-house fact checking a part of its model. As it turned out, the experiment was a slap-up success.
Contractually, the writer was still legally responsible for the factuality of their text, merely the banner gear up aside a pot of money separate from the author'south accelerate for fact checking, which they then paid to the author, who personally paid the fact checker. Information technology was not required that the writer utilize this coin, simply information technology was strongly recommended, and most authors writing books rooted in inquiry and reporting availed themselves of information technology. Before the copyediting procedure commenced, the imprint found the fact checker and connected them to the author, but the author and the fact checker conducted their own correspondence, similar to how a mag fact checker and writer would operate.
Many in the industry seem to feel that fact checking volition never be a standard part of the publishing process for financial reasons—publishing houses simply don't have the money. Tim Duggan Books is proof positive that a traditional literary imprint can find the money to fact check their books—a sum that may really be less than you'd think. Past having a consistent system and a pocket-size roster of checkers used routinely, publishers remove the time and labor of finding a checker, establishing parameters and trust, agreeing on a charge per unit, and laying out a timeline—all of which is necessary each fourth dimension an individual author finds and hires an individual fact checker.
Unfortunately, Tim Duggan Books was recently dissolved due to cuts and consolidations from COVID-19, though there is no reason to think that the budget for fact checking factored into this decision. Upon hearing the news, many of the imprint's authors and supporters took to Twitter to praise its commitment to fact checking, including The New Commonwealth's Laura Marsh.
The cost of fact checking a nonfiction book has also gone down in the last ten years, according to an industry insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Google's search algorithms, which automatically sort through hundreds of billions of webpages and rank the results based on relevance and credibility, have improved dramatically in the last x years, and as information that would previously accept been housed only in print libraries or archives is digitized, the cost will only continue to decrease.
"I've noticed a modify even in but the past few years," says Hilary McClellen, who has worked every bit a fact checker since 1998. "It seems similar Google has a lot more books digitized and searchable than even a few years ago, and Amazon tin can be used for volume searching cross reference if the pages are missing in Google. I still have to make trips to the library for print or annal on some projects, merely information technology's not the day-long consequence it was years ago."
In that location are besides ethical and power imbalances for the fact checkers themselves embedded into the electric current state of nonfiction book fact checking affairs. In wide strokes, hourly rates are more favorable to fact checkers, while lump sums are more favorable to writers. With an excess of qualified freelance fact checkers, it's the writer who often ends up with the choosing ability of being "the customer." My own fact checker, Maia Hibbett, accepted the lump sum I paid her, she says, despite originally request for an hourly charge per unit, because she was inexperienced and didn't have any other piece of work; some weeks of steady employment, she figured, were ameliorate than nothing.
"I can see it condign very easy for a fact-checker to end upwardly working for as little equally $10 or $12 an 60 minutes if they sign on to bank check a book for a depression flat rate," says Glyn Peterson, a seasoned fact checker who recently worked on Susannah Cahalan's second volume, The Great Pretender.
"Information technology's difficult to know what you should need, because you can only base your expectations off of your own experience or word-of-oral fissure, and there'due south no one to back you upward if an employer resists what y'all're request for," says Hibbett. Full time fact checkers for magazines such as New York, where she is now employed, offering membership to their union, a chapter of the NewsGuild of New York. There are some freelancers' unions, she notes, including Freelance Solidarity Project, which is part of the National Writers Spousal relationship.
"Information technology seems inappropriate and counterproductive that the writer, and not the editor, decides which fact-checking changes to accept or ignore," says Peterson. "I can meet situations in which writers decide to ignore fact-checking suggestions, letting potentially significant errors remain in their books. When checking for magazines, fact-checkers have more power to abet for their piece of work, because they can go to editors with their concerns if the reporter they are working with refuses to address major errors."
No such organisation exists for contained fact checking, equally fact checkers are often not in touch with the editors working on the volume they just fact checked. It is also unwise on and then many levels to have the person who signs the checks (or Venmos the coin) exist the same person whose work the checker is being paid to call into question. Further, when the author and checker are working independently rather than within the system of a magazine or publishing house, the author herself, as the employer, has the concluding say in the process, a foreign state of affairs when it comes to the truth.
The obvious solution is to institute a common ready of guidelines that set expectations, rates, and protocols for fact checking. Setting these expectations must be the responsibleness of publishers, non authors.
Editors and publishers may have to conduct in mind that the range of books published by an imprint may be extremely vast, varying from memoirs to current events to true offense, all of which demand different levels of legal vetting and fact checking. Editors likewise typically struggle with the pressure to schedule books far in advance, and equally the promised appointment of delivery to the sales team approaches, delays accumulate, pregnant that the timeline becomes crunched. The guidelines and protocols for incorporating fact checking into the product process must be fluid; they might involve the kind of prioritizing of resources that many publishing houses already utilise to legal vetting, where they pay for the books that really demand it to be legally vetted, while the ones that don't are not vetted.
Only the reason why the publishing manufacture has been deadening to implement such guidelines for fact checking may lie further down in the foundation of the whole system. Without widespread consumer sensation that well-nigh books are not fact checked, or about which imprints publish which books, there's no existent reason for publishers to care almost fact checking. If it comes to light that a volume contains major errors, information technology's the author, not the publisher, whose reputation takes the hit.
"No 1 looks at the publishing house's name on the book they bought four years ago when Newsweek exposes it as inaccurate and says, 'I'll never buy a book published by them once more!'" Scott Rosenberg of the at present-defunct service MediaBugs told The Atlantic in 2014.
Meanwhile, the stakes of not fact checking books only continue to get higher, as it'due south become easier and easier to destroy a volume's credibility with a few clicks.
"If you're writing a remotely controversial book, there'due south going to be an active audition that's invested in discrediting it," Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, told The New York Times .
However, the gap betwixt publishers and readers may be endmost. We are in the midst of a moment where ordinary citizens are more than invested than ever before in interrogating who gets to determine what counts as the truth in the stories we tell.
In the past half dozen months in the world of media and publishing, we have seen resistance to the condition quo at levels of magnitude previously unimaginable. After an employee walkout across several of their imprints, Hachette Book Group dropped its plans to publish Woody Allen's memoir. Macmillan, which houses Flatiron Books, agreed to substantially increase its Latinx representation both in its authors and staff later on widespread criticism over the banner's handling of the novel American Dirt. Top editors at Bon Appétit, the New York Times, Condé Nast Amusement, Refinery29, Okayplayer, Variety, and The Philadelphia Inquirer have all "resigned or stepped back," wrote Vulture, in its comprehensive listing of recent media reckonings in the wake of last month's anti-racist uprisings confronting the land-sanctioned murder of Blackness people.
"There is besides a systemic issue here," wrote Anand Giridharadas in his scathing New York Times review of Jared Diamond's book Upheaval: Turning Points For Nations in Crunch which looks at what makes some nations able and some unable to recover from times of turmoil. "The fourth dimension has come for those of united states who piece of work in book-length nonfiction to insist that professional fact-checking get as inalienable from publishing equally publicity, marketing, and jacket design."
I agree. The more we ask the big, shifty questions nearly power and privilege and truth, the more our foundation must be rock solid. Editors must insist on fact checking budgets for their authors, and authors must keep insisting for them such that nosotros can all pay fact checkers fairly. Agents must become involved too; during the course of contract negotiations, other services such equally a photography budget and permissions clearance budget are battlegrounds that publishers do sometimes pay for.
"Over the last year, deaths, retirements and executive reshuffling have made fashion for new leaders, more diverse and often more commercial than their predecessors, equally well as people who have never worked in publishing before," the New York Times recently wrote. "Those appointments stand up to fundamentally change the manufacture, and the books it puts out into the world."
Investing in fact checking is within our grasp; all nosotros have to practice is try.
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Source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a33577796/nonfiction-book-fact-checking-should-be-an-industry-standard/
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