Our guest blog post today is Victoria Brown author of Zemsta. Click here to visit Victoria’s blog.
Errata Gone Wild
We all know the bane of indie authors is that nothing is proofed properly, and self-published books are rife with typos. Or that’s what everyone seems to think.
According to Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/qUMMOk): “For readers who find humanity in orthographic quirks, these are great times. Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?
“Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.”
Here are some interesting typos I came upon while trawling the web:
• In the book Probing the Mind of a Serial Killer the topic matter is serial killers. Whenever the author referenced sexual sadists it was “sexual saddest.” This was repeated over and over and over.
• In Sam de Britto’s Lost Boys: “The flour of us got in the car…”
• In Outlaw Embrace: “Working undercover during a train holdup, the last thing he needs is a beautiful southern belle to protect. But when his viscous brother sets designs on Anastasia Hamilton, he’s forced to claim her as his own.”
• Not sure where this one came from: “She curled up on the couch hoping to find solstice.”
• A newspaper’s sports section reporting on a basketball player’s injuries: “He had a herniated disk…but they used a “c” instead of an “s” in disk.
• Published in a church bulletin: “Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM. Prayer and medication to follow.”
• In a novel, the heroine is preparing a grenade and shouts, “Fire in the whole!” to her team.
• In Trevor Scott’s Burst of Sound: “They moved onto the wooden dock where the fairy had docked the day before, saving Tony the long drive.”
• In one of Kim Harrison’s Hollow books, every time they mention the brakes on a car, it’s spelled “breaks,” except when the brake line breaks and then it’s reversed so the break line brakes.
• In “The Pasta Bible” a recipe calls for “freshly ground black people.”
What are your favorite typos?
Victoria Brown author of Zemsta.
Mother load for mother lode. Totally Freudian.
Most mainstream books contain the odd error and we need to forgive occasional mistakes. It is impossible for one person to pick up eveything. Indie authors are wise to have their work copy edited, but this will not guarantee perfection. Indeed it is most probable that a few errors will still slip through. Only when the number of errors detracts from the reading experience should we be critical.
I agree. The occasional error is quite common and it does not impact on the quality of the book.
Thank ewe sew much for righting this article! The “war on Indies” seems to have escalated of late. I considered underlining errors like those above in my Kindle for traditionally published books. I wanted to create a movement, but decided against it. Should we go for it? ::evil snicker::
As one of those poor unemployed copy editors I can affirm that errors always have existed, and always will. However, the push to publish direct from desk to internet means that the poor reporter who used to have run every piece of copy past both a main desk editor and copy editor now hits send and his work hits the great big world with nary an eyeball having scanned it for content or copy. The pressure to do more with fewer people, to write more pieces, produce multimedia pieces covering the same content, and often act as your own photographer or videographer means that the quality of the product has gone down at the same time as the quantity has risen.
Books have just started down the path that newspapers began more than a decade ago. I can see a point at which books will reach a convergence where the distinction between traditionally published and indies is eliminated.
I don’t like it, but have been banging my head against the wall so long that I all I see are stars, not solutions.
Specially love the viscous brother.
Part of this has to do with computerized spell-checking. All of those examples were perfectly spelled WRONG WORDS. Outsourcing production to countries where English isn’t the first language might have a bit to do with it. Sometimes errors are introduced in the copyediting process.
But mainly, these mistakes are caused by the publishers cheeping out. See? I typed cheaping out, but spell check “fixed” it for me.
Funny collection of errata. Thanks!