Fact-Checking in Publishing
An Editor Protects the Author by Protecting the Book
It has been a shocking week in print. Thanks to The Times, we now know that Bruce Springsteen wears pyjamas; we also learned that Earl (Four Weddings and a Funeral ) Spencer loathes fitted carpets, deeming them thoroughly "common". It is a worrying stance for an earl - stuck in the middle, in that an earl defers to a duke and a marquess, and looks down on newer earls, a viscount, a baron and, presumably, anyone with underlay. Spencer’s portrait of his stepmother, Raine, also includes her demanding, “Where is my f--ing egg?” Between the carpets and the catering, life at Althorp appears to have been a considerable trial.
Aristocratic readers are advised that no flooring they may find distressing is mentioned. again.
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Moving away from the hazardous world of soft furnishings and pyjamas, we are here to look at something much more hazardous to a publisher and author's health: fact-checking and we'll start with a book which will definitely not be in Queen Camilla's book club.
Swan Song Diana, My Sister By Charles Spencer
See You In Court
An error is much easier to deal with while it is still a query in the margin. Once the book reaches the bookshops, the person asking the question may have a television programme and a firm of solicitors.
Charles Spencer’s Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, published on 22 September 2026, provides a particularly public example. His account linked Piers Morgan to the publication of intrusive photographs of Diana exercising in a gym. There was a readily checkable problem: the photographs appeared in the Sunday Mirror on 7 November 1993. Morgan did not become editor of the Daily Mirror until October 1995. At the time the photographs appeared, he was working for The Sun.
On his Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube show, Morgan said:
I come across in the most despicable manner imaginable. There’s just one problem. It’s all bulls--t and very, very easy bulls--t for me to prove it,
He continued:
Earl Spencer was estranged from Diana and living in South Africa at the time of her death.
As editor of The Daily Mirror, I had lunch with her at Kensington Palace with Prince William. After that, it wasn’t uncommon for her to call my office or for me to run stories by her… Ironically, by that time in her life, I think I was probably talking to her more often than he was.
My question, though, is this - if Earl Spencer can be so incredibly, defamatory
If he's wrong about such basic facts involving me, well, why should we believe anything else he puts in this book?
Spencer apologised for the mistaken assumption but Morgan wants more, demanding the removal of the offending material and for the book to be withdrawn and copies pulped. He has also said he is taking legal action against Spencer and Penguin, seeking damages to be paid to the King’s Trust. Reports indicate that future editions will correct the error; that is a different undertaking from withdrawing the copies already on sale.
The disagreement also includes Spencer’s description of Morgan’s manner during a telephone conversation about Diana’s funeral. Spencer stands by his recollection; Morgan disputes it. Here we have a distinction that matters to anyone making a book: how somebody sounded in a private conversation nearly thirty years ago may remain contested. Which newspaper employed them on a particular date is something that can be checked.
One established error does not prove that the rest of a book is wrong, but it gives anyone challenging the book a useful starting point. Morgan has already used this mistake to question the credibility of Spencer’s wider account. A book about Diana consequently finds itself sharing its publicity with an argument about whether its author can be trusted.
From a publishing perspective, that is the larger problem. A correction can repair a sentence in the next printing. Repairing readers’ confidence may take considerably more work.
We do not know precisely what editorial checks this manuscript underwent, or how the error survived them. But the question that might have prevented this particular dispute was straightforward: was Morgan actually the editor when those photographs appeared?
The Solicitor’s Letter
Publishing’s unofficial companion volume to the celebrity memoir remains the solicitor’s letter with fewer photographs and a more attentive readership.
The latest example involves Wayne Rooney and Andy Carroll. According to The Sun, Rooney’s lawyers have written to Macmillan the publisher of Carroll’s autobiography, Owning It, demanding the retraction of claims about drinking during England duty. Rooney denies the account. An earlier report quoted an unnamed friend saying Carroll stood by his recollection and that the manuscript had undergone editorial and legal checks.
A dispute, then. A lawyers’ letter is not a verdict, and the reporting does not establish which account is accurate or what the publisher checked.
This does bring us back to the editor’s awkward questions. When did this happen? Who else was present? Is there anything beyond recollection to support it? Was the person described approached for a response, and how was any disagreement handled?
“I remember it clearly” is a perfectly reasonable place for a memoir to begin. The editorial work begins with the next question: “What can we establish?”
Fact checking and legal review have related but distinct jobs. One examines the evidence; the other assesses the legal implications of publication. Neither can promise that nobody will object. Both deserve attention before the publicity department orders the balloons.
The buck stops somewhere, better to establish where while everyone is still speaking.
You have written a memoir, a history for children, or a novel involving real people.
Somewhere in it is a claim that somebody, sooner or later, may challenge.
Who tests it first: someone working on the book, or someone confronting you after publication?
Where I Am Speaking From
I should explain where I am speaking from, I am not a specialist fact-checker looking down on the publishing process from a safe height, I am a book-maker and something of a Jack of all trades. I create and design series, write synopses and sometimes the books themselves. I commissioned authors and illustrators, worked with editors and consultants, negotiated co-editions and dealt with printers and salespeople. I also owned the company that would have to pay when something went wrong. In other words, the buck stopped with me. President Harry Truman famously kept a painted glass sign on his desk: The Buck Stops Here. Its message was simple: responsibility could not be passed indefinitely from one person to another. Publishing involves many hands, but somebody has to accept responsibility for the finished book. I could commission the writing, delegate the editing and pay for specialist advice. As the publisher, I still had to answer for what we put into readers’ hands.
I therefore had a vested interest in everything being as correct as we could make it. That is not the same as saying that every book was perfect, errors slipped through and of course knowledge changes and we know that a correction could solve one problem and introduce another. An illustration could be historically accurate in seventeen details and wrong in the eighteenth. The existence of an editorial process is no guarantee that the process has worked.
That is why checking matters, It does not demonstrate that the publisher distrusts the author or believes itself infallible, the system recognises that books are made by fallible people, often working quickly, and that a mistake is easier to correct before it has been printed 20,000 times and translated into twelve languages.
Not Every Publishing Fact Checking Crisis Is an Editorial Failure
Publishing has had a bad run of authors in trouble, and it is tempting to put all the cases together, I don't really think that is helpful, they are not all failures of editing.
In some cases the questions concern claims made in the book. The Salt Path sold more than two million copies before the Observer, in July 2025, raised questions about parts of the story it told - questions Raynor Winn has strongly contested. The problem with The Salt Path was it was claimed to be a "true story'.Jason Arday's Great and Unfortunate Things, written with Eve Claxton, contained biographical claims that were already under intense public scrutiny before the UK edition reached the shops.
There is another complication in the meaning of authorship. Great and Unfortunate Things is presented as Jason Arday’s memoir but is credited as written “with Eve Claxton”. Claxton was an acknowledged and consenting collaborator. Yet it reveals how flexibly publishing uses the word “author”. It can mean the person whose life supplies the story, the person who writes the sentences, the person whose name sells the book or the person who signs the warranty that its claims are true. Those may be two, three or even four different people. Credit tells us something about who made the book; it does not necessarily tell us who supplied, checked or accepted responsibility for each claim.
In both cases, questions eventually asked in public might usefully have been asked at a desk.
When the Problem is the Author, Not the Book
There is a distinct category of publishing crises that no amount of traditional manuscript fact-checking can prevent. These are cases where the issue is not a flaw in the text, but a reputational liability attached to the author themselves.
On 18 September 2026,
The Bookseller reported that HarperCollins UK had officially dropped David Walliams' entire 23-book back catalogue, severing all remaining publishing ties with the author. This decision followed the company's late 2025 announcement that it would no longer publish new works by Walliams following internal investigations into allegations of inappropriate conduct toward staff. Walliams has strongly denied all claims of inappropriate behaviour, with his representatives stating he was never formally notified of or included in the publisher's internal investigation.
In November 25, New Frontier withdrew Sarah Ferguson's Flora and Fern: Kindness Along the Way as her association with Jeffrey Epstein returned to the news. No subject consultant could have discovered either problem by reading the manuscript.
Kate Clanchy's case is different again, the controversy over Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me was not principally an allegation that she had invented her life. It concerned the language she used to describe some of her pupils and how that language should be read. Picador had edited and published the book, entered it for the Orwell Prize, which it won, and celebrated its success. When selected passages attracted fierce criticism in 2021, the publisher apologised and the relationship eventually ended. In November 2025 Pan Macmillan apologised to Clanchy for failing to support her properly.
These cases teach different lessons, the first is about checking - the others concern what a publisher does when it believes it must protect its own reputation, how it reaches that decision, and what it owes the author when it does. They all belong in a discussion of what an author might reasonably expect, but we should not pretend they are the same thing.
Why Fact Checking in Publishing Matters More in Children's Books
When I started creating and designing books in the late 1980’s, our non-fiction titles had two people paid to know things: a writer and a consultant. The consultant was often an academic or a museum curator - history and science were the subjects, and museums were where many of the experts were.
The manuscript and illustrations for the first book I created, designed and wrote
on Vikings were checked by Sir David Wilson as a consultant, he was then director of the British Museum, and an expert on Vikings. The practice continued across all the books I produced. A Roman Fort, written by Fiona Macdonald, was read by Stephen Johnson, an Oxford-trained archaeologist and English Heritage specialist in Roman fortifications; its book editor was Jenny Millington. A Samurai Castle was read by Helena Gomm, who had studied at Oxford and lived and taught in Japan for five years. Much later, You Wouldn't Want to Be an Anglo-Saxon Peasant, the historian Dr Christopher Monk worked as historical adviser and developmental editor, examining the pictures as well as the words.
That distinction mattered, in an illustrated information book, a perfectly accurate sentence can sit beside a historically impossible picture. A consultant might correct the shape of a Roman shield, the construction of a roof, the food on a table or the date at which a particular weapon came into use. The illustrator could not be expected to know all of this, and neither could the editor, accuracy had to be built collectively.
For books aimed at the youngest readers there could be a third specialist - a text or educational consultant who knew what a six-year-old could read, what might stop them and what they were likely to understand without an adult beside them. Subject knowledge and knowledge of how children read are not the same expertise.
This was not generosity, a children's non-fiction book is a machine for putting facts into people who cannot yet check them. The wrong date in a book for adults is an error. The wrong date in a book for eight-year-olds is a wrong date in thousands of homework essays. The reader trusts the book because the reader may have nothing else against which to test it. Non-fiction is a definition that means it does not have fiction in it.
Fictionalised history needed checking most of all, inserting a made-up child into a real Roman street and the reader will take the street as real - the shop signs, the food, the coins - because that is the bargain a historical story makes. If the street is wrong, the story has lied and the reader can't tell where. The consultant's job on those books was to make sure that everything the author had not invented was true, so that the reader could safely believe the rest.
What We Owe the Reader
There is a more important reason for doing all of this, we owe it to the reader.
When we put the name of a recognised publisher on a work of non-fiction, we are asking the reader to trust it. The reader cannot see the contract, the legal report, the consultant's corrections or the correspondence between author and editor. They cannot know whether a claim has been checked against three sources or copied from the first result of a search. They see the publisher's name and reasonably assume that somebody has asked.
This is especially important in children's non-fiction, but it applies to memoir, biography, history, health, politics and every other form that presents itself as an account of the world. We want the book to be right - not merely defensible under a warranty clause, but as accurate as the author, editor and publisher can reasonably make it with the knowledge available at the time.
In July 2025, defending Penguin's handling of The Salt Path, Tom Weldon said that Penguin had gained the trust of readers through the quality of the books it put into the world, and that books remained essential as authoritative, expert and human-crafted content in a world where anyone could publish anything online. I commented at the time that heritage was not a substitute for rigour. If a publisher asks to be trusted because its books are authoritative, the difference between its non-fiction and a self-published account must be more than the name on the spine and the quality of the cover, it must be the work behind them.
That does not mean that the publisher guarantees perfection. No responsible publisher could. It means that the reader is entitled to expect curiosity, scrutiny and care - and to believe that when a question mattered, somebody tried to answer it before asking the reader to pay for the book.
That is the principle, now the steps.
Step 1: Expect to Be Questioned
The first difficult question about your book should come from your editor, the next may come in public.
A good editorial letter is mostly questions: Did this happen in this order? Where were you standing? Can you show me? What does the reader need to know here that you have assumed they know? None of that is an accusation. It is a rehearsal - every question an editor asks in-house is one less question that may have to be answered later to a stranger with a keyboard.
Consider what happened to The Salt Path. Long before any newspaper took an interest, some readers were noticing oddities back in 2018. Amazon reviews were already querying parts of the account and asking whether aspects of it quite added up. They were doing, unpaid and years early, some of the questioning that would eventually be done in public by journalists.
It would be wrong to treat an Amazon review as proof that a book is false, readers misunderstand things, disagree with authors and occasionally write nonsense and the one star review for delivery or a second hand copy being damp or creased murders the overall star rating. But a pattern of specific questions is information and it's a reason to look again.
Whatever the eventual truth of all the disputed claims - and Winn has strongly contested the Observer's account - the author was left answering in public questions that could have been asked privately, once, by an editor saying: "Can we have a quiet word?"
So when an editor asks you something you would rather not be asked, it is worth understanding what may be happening. They may be trying to save you from being asked the same thing later by somebody who is not on your side.
Step 2: Expect Someone Who Knows the Subject
A copyeditor may catch a wrong date because they notice it or happen to know it. A subject consultant is paid to know it. These are not the same job, and it is unwise to assume that the first will always do the second.
There is another distinction worth making, a legal read asks whether a publisher can safely print a claim. A fact-check asks whether the claim is true. An author's warranty in a contract transfers responsibility for the claim; it does not establish its truth - all three may be necessary, but one is not a substitute for another.
On one series of children's non-fiction, the consultant read the synopsis before a word of the manuscript was written - I was trying to sell the concept to a US co-edition partner. The manuscript went to the consultant before the pages were designed and laid out. The printout went to the consultant before the book went to the printer. Three readings, three sets of corrections, every one incorporated by the editor. In the age of post and couriers it was slow, but it was not expensive, and it was one reason an American publisher, with American librarians to answer to, would buy the books. For US-specific titles we hired a second specialist.
The consultant was not the only check. The best authors checked themselves, and two of the best were Jacqueline Morley and Fiona Macdonald. In the early 1990s Jacqueline was writing Timelines: Clothes for Work, Play and Display for me, and she worked to a rule I have never seen bettered: nothing went in on only one source.
Everybody knows that the towering hairstyles of the 1770s were so rarely taken down that mice nested in them. Jacqueline went looking for where the story came from and could not find it. The hair could catch fire - there are accounts of that - but a mouse in a head of hair, reported by someone who saw it? Nothing. I have looked again since, with tools she never had, and found nothing either. A wig left in a cupboard with animal-fat pomade might attract mice, but that is a fact about cupboards. The rest is caricature, and a caricature is evidence that people laughed at an idea, not evidence of a nest. She left it out.
Then she found something better, and left that out too. In a country-house library she came across a reference from the Revolutionary years, when French fashion turned to the antique. To get the look of a naked classical statue below the waist, it said, some men had their close-fitting culottes made from the skins of executed men. I wanted it in the book - ghoulish curiosity, and with hindsight far too horrible. Jacqueline would not have it. One reference, in one library, with nothing beside it, is not a fact. It is a story.
The internet now finds what she couldn't - not corroboration, but something nearer the origin. The allegation appears in Carlyle's The French Revolution, drawn from the memoirs of the comte de Montgaillard, who reported a tannery of human skin at Meudon "with considerable calmness", as Carlyle drily notes, and claimed that men's skin made better leather than women's. What Jacqueline had found was not a second source but part of the long afterlife of a sensational claim. She couldn't trace that chain in 1992, and she didn't need to. Thirty years on, the search engines caught up with her caution.
That is what checking is. It is not a chance to prove who is cleverest. It is a refusal to print what only one person has said, even when it is the best thing you have found.
So ask your publisher who is reading your book who knows the subject - not for pace, tone or saleability, but for truth. If it is a memoir, the question is harder: who will ask what can be corroborated, what rests on memory, and what should be presented as recollection rather than fact? If the answer is nobody, your book may go out with a warranty clause and very little checking behind it.
Step 3: Expect Your Name to Sit on a Process, Not Just a Cover
Open one of the books I made in the 1990s and turn to the imprint page, under the author and illustrator you will often find another name: the consultant. They were paid, they were credited, they were given a short biography beside the writer and artist.
That line did two things, the first is obvious, someone who knew the subject had read the spreads and sent back corrections before the book went to print. The writer - briefed, working fast to a format - had been saved from mistakes that a briefed writer working fast will sometimes make. The pictures had also been examined by somebody capable of seeing an anachronism that an editor, designer or illustrator might miss.
The second is less obvious and may have mattered more.
The biography was read.
School librarians and teachers buy books out of budgets that are small, fought for and gone by Christmas. When one of them picked up a title and found a museum or university specialist on the imprint page, they knew what it meant. It meant the book had been through something. It meant that if a child took a fact from it into a classroom, there was a reasonable expectation that the fact would stand. The credit and biography was a promise, and the promise was part of what they were buying. A packager or publisher's reputation lived on that page as did the writer's, the illustrator's, the consultant's, the co-edition partner's and mine.
This is what I mean by expecting your name to sit on a process, the process is part of the product. It is what separates a book a school can rely on from one that just looks like it can be relied upon.
Now pick up a memoir and turn to the same page, there may have been a copyedit and legal reading, but usually no independent fact-checker is named. The collaborator may or may not be clearly acknowledged. There is a name on the cover and a warranty clause in a contract the reader will never see.
This arrangement does not mean that nobody has taken care over the book, and it would be unfair to assume that all publishers work in exactly the same way. It does mean that the public cannot usually see what sort of checking has taken place. The author may also discover that a contractual warranty gives the publisher protection without giving the author much practical help when a claim is challenged.
So ask, ask who has read your manuscript who knows the subject. Ask whether this was a factual check or a legal read. Ask whether the person will be paid and credited. If the answers are nobody, no and no, understand what that means: the first expert reader of your book may be a stranger after publication, and they will not be sending their corrections privately to you.
Step 4: Expect One Authoritative Master File
Accuracy is not only a question of scholarship, it is also a question of production control.
When I started, every alteration made at the proof stage was charged for by the printer. This concentrated the mind. The editor marked the proof, the corrections were costed and there was a visible record of what had been changed.
Later, printers would sometimes make last-minute corrections at no additional cost, this sounded like progress, and usually it was helpful, but it created another problem. A correction might be made to the printer's file without being entered into the publisher's master file. The next edition could then be produced from the uncorrected master and the old error would quietly return.
A single title might exist as a library edition, a paperback and an ordinary hardback. An American edition and several foreign-language co-editions might follow. If corrections were made separately, the editions could begin to drift apart. One might contain the latest text but an earlier caption; another might have the corrected artwork but not the corrected index. The book was no longer one book. It had become a small family of closely related books, each capable of inheriting a different mistake.
An editor therefore had to be scrupulous about entering every approved amendment into the authoritative master files and making certain that each new edition was derived from them. That could become surprisingly complex when several formats or language editions were going to print at much the same time.
This is also why the phrase "we corrected it" may not mean quite what it appears to mean. Which edition was corrected? Which file? Did the change reach the hardback, paperback and library binding? Was it passed to the American publisher? Did the printer alter its working file while the publisher's master remained untouched? A correction that has not been carried back through the system is only a temporary improvement.
The more successful a book becomes, the more formats, territories, reprints and opportunities for divergence it acquires. An error can travel extremely well. The correction needs an itinerary of its own.
Step 5: Expect Your Publisher to Know the Difference Between Defending You and Defending Itself
In August 2026, with questions surrounding the Arday book, Alexandra Pringle appeared on the Today programme on Radio 4 and argued that memoir was different from journalism or autobiography. Fact-checking, she said, did not really apply in the same way because memoir is subjective and can verge on fiction.
Alexandra Pringle was Editorial Director at Virago Press in the 1980s and Editorial Director at Hamish Hamilton and a literary agent in the 1990s. In 1999 she joined Bloomsbury Publishing where she was Editor-in-Chief for over twenty years. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Visiting Professor at the Centre For Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her memoir, Caravan, is to be published by Canongate in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US in 2027.
The late Queen Elizabeth made a memorable statement in response to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s bombshell television interview with Oprah Winfrey “while some recollections may vary"... two people can remember the same event quite differently, and neither needs to be lying.
But subjectivity is not the same as a licence for every kind of claim, a remembered conversation and the number of marathons someone ran are different things. One may be an impression; the other can be counted.
Saying that fact-checking does not really apply risks defending the publishing process rather than protecting the author. It suggests that nothing went wrong because there was nothing the publisher could reasonably have been expected to do. It leaves the author where he was - alone with the claims. A publisher that has checked may be able to stand behind its author with evidence, a publisher that has not may have little more than a statement.
There is a version of looking after an author that consists of celebrating them at launch and defending them at the first sign of trouble. It can feel loyal, but the more useful loyalty may have been a query sheet months earlier.
A lengthy independent investigation published by Cartrarian reconstructs the changing versions of Jason Arday’s public biography across interviews, academic publications, institutional profiles and his memoir. Its language is sometimes intemperate and some of its conclusions remain interpretations rather than established facts, but the scale of its source-based research is remarkable. Above all, it demonstrates how many apparently autobiographical claims could be compared with contemporaneous records - and therefore why it is inadequate to say that fact-checking simply “doesn’t really apply” to memoir.
Particularly troubling are the reported differences between the proposal and the published memoir. Several dramatic claims - including testicular cancer and a prolonged coma - were apparently removed before publication. That suggests some editorial selection or verification took place, but raises the further question of why those concerns did not lead to a systematic examination of the remaining account.
The point is not that every conclusion reached by an independent investigator must be accepted. It is that an independent investigator was able to locate an extensive body of relevant evidence which the professional publishing process should itself have examined.
The Clanchy Case
The Clanchy case appears to show the opposite failure, but it grew from a related uncertainty. Picador had edited and published the book, entered it for prizes and benefited from its success. Yet when the controversy arrived, the company seems not to have had a settled understanding of what it was prepared to defend in the book or why. Pan Macmillan's later apology acknowledged that it had failed to support its author properly.
Read the cases together and a broader lesson emerges. A publisher should not defend a claim merely because it has published it, nor abandon an author merely because criticism has arrived. It should have done enough work beforehand to understand the book, the evidence and the decisions it made. Checking does not remove every difficulty, but it gives everybody something firmer to stand on when the difficulty comes.
Step 6: Expect to Be Told
The other kind of case - Walliams and Ferguson - has little to do with textual checking and more to do with how a publishing relationship changes or ends.
Whatever you think of either case, notice the way the news emerged. Walliams's representative says he learned of HarperCollins's decision without having been told what he was accused of. Ferguson's book disappeared from the trade database and was then reported as having been withdrawn. In both cases, the publisher made a decision to protect its own name, as every business sometimes will. The public record leaves questions about when and how the author was told.
Publishers now frequently say that people matter most, this is one of the moments in which authors and staff discover what those words mean in practice.
So expect, at the very least, to be told - before the newspaper, and by someone whose name you know.
What Checking Costs
Part One had a section on what editing costs, this is the equivalent, and it is shorter because the sums are easy.
A subject consultant on a 32 or 48 page children's title cost us between £200 and £500 a figure, or a comparison such as "less than the illustration of a single spread"]. That bought three readings and a name on the imprint page. It also bought corrections to the pictures, captions, chronology and main text.
Set that against the cost of a print run pulped, a title withdrawn, a week in the newspapers and a reputation that takes ten years to build and a weekend to lose - not the author's alone, but potentially the illustrator's, consultant's, co-edition partner's and publisher's too.
Fact-checking was never altruism, nobody wants to be at the centre of a public storm, and in a publishing company there were a dozen people whose livelihoods stood or fell with every book, the consultant's fee was the cheapest insurance in the building.
Before Your Book Goes to Press, Ask
Who has checked its factual claims independently?
What qualifications or experience do they have?
Have they examined the illustrations, captions, maps and timeline as well as the main text?
Is this fact-checking, or only a legal read?
Have the corrections been recorded and incorporated?
Will the checker or consultant be credited?
Which file is the authoritative master?
Who records corrections made at proof stage or by the printer?
Have those corrections been returned to the master files?
Are the hardback, paperback, library and overseas editions using the same corrected material?
Is there a dated record of what changed, why it changed and who approved it?
What happens if a serious question arises after publication?
Who will contact the author, and who is authorised to speak publicly?
Final Thoughts: Is Checking Worth It?
Of course, but that is the wrong question because it treats checking as a cost that might be avoided. It is not. It is a cost that will be paid either way. The only choice is who pays it and when: the publisher, in private, before publication - or the author and publisher together, in public, after.
This is not an argument that publishers of the past were perfect, we were certainly not. It is not an argument that every manuscript requires an academic inquiry or that every author should be treated as a suspect. It is an argument for a visible, proportionate process carried out by people who understand what they are checking and why.
Expect to be questioned, expect someone who knows. Expect the process to be visible.
Expect one reliable master record of the book. Expect your publisher to understand what it is defending and why. Expect to be told when something changes. None of that is a great deal to ask. It is what turns a manuscript into a book that the author, publisher and reader can trust.
The questions will be asked eventually. A good publisher makes sure the difficult ones are asked in private, while there is still time to improve the book.
Every effort has been made to check the facts, any surviving errors are my own and will be corrected with gratitude. Regrettably, I have no relatives I can monetise, so readers contemplating legal action should adjust their expectations accordingly.
Sources and Further Reading
Simon & Schuster UK: Great and Unfortunate Things by Jason Arday with Eve Claxton
The Observer on the Arday memoir and publishing fact-checking
The Bookseller on the withdrawal of Sarah Ferguson's Flora and Fern
Carlyle's The French Revolution, containing the Meudon allegation
Dr Christopher Monk on consulting for You Wouldn't Want to Be an Anglo-Saxon Peasant
David Salariya founded The Salariya Book Company in Brighton in 1989 and ran it for more than thirty years, designing, writing and commissioning illustrated books for children that were published in over thirty-five languages. He created the You Wouldn't Want to Be... series, among some fifty others, employed subject consultants from museums and universities on non-fiction titles, and wrote the synopsis for many of them before an author was hired. He trained at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. He lives in Brighton, has no quarrel with fitted carpets and believes that difficulties obtaining an egg should, wherever possible, be resolved before they become a family memoir. He writes about publishing at davidsalariya.com
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