- Joined
- Nov 1, 2011
- Messages
- 495
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Oh gosh, typos. I was mortified that in the first edition of my first book, back in 1999, the word 'brain' was spelled 'brian', which was bad enough, but it was the start of a sentence, so as I read it, I thought, "Who then heck is Brian?" Luckily the first run sold really well, and it was fixed before another print.
My greatest memory of my first book launch was the drive home. My husband, who has an eagle eye for any error of any sort, went through my book and pointed out every.single.typo. I'm sure there weren't many, but to me, at the time, it seemed horrific. After half an hour of this entertainment, checking cross references and notes to see if anyone had goofed anything up, he realized that this maybe was not a good way to try to be helpful. Hmm.
One of the lessons I learned was that there are many things that are outside a writer's control. I'd edited and proofread so carefully. So had my editor, not to mention the proofreaders. Everyone worked so hard to make it perfect, yet still, a few small mistakes crept in.
Interestingly, although the errors leaped from the page to me as I was so familiar with the text, no reader ever emailed me to point them out, or to ask who Brian was.
My greatest memory of my first book launch was the drive home. My husband, who has an eagle eye for any error of any sort, went through my book and pointed out every.single.typo. I'm sure there weren't many, but to me, at the time, it seemed horrific. After half an hour of this entertainment, checking cross references and notes to see if anyone had goofed anything up, he realized that this maybe was not a good way to try to be helpful. Hmm.
One of the lessons I learned was that there are many things that are outside a writer's control. I'd edited and proofread so carefully. So had my editor, not to mention the proofreaders. Everyone worked so hard to make it perfect, yet still, a few small mistakes crept in.
Interestingly, although the errors leaped from the page to me as I was so familiar with the text, no reader ever emailed me to point them out, or to ask who Brian was.