Who Do You Tell About Typos in Books?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Trevor Summers from Waxahachie, Texas.

Hi Trevor, welcome.

I have a question about reading a book.

We all have books in our library that we value, that we treasure, that we like.

What should I do if I’m reading one of these valuable books that I like, a book printed by a reputable publishing house, and I find a misspelled word?

Oh boy.

Should I do nothing, or should I email someone or write someone?

I’m never sure what to do because it always kind of taints the experience.

What do you think?

Is it a current book, a recent book?

Yes, current enough.

Okay.

Are you sure it’s misspelled?

Yes, the word was return.

It was obviously misspelled, missing one letter.

Oh, wow.

The reason I ask is because there are a lot of variants.

And as somebody who used to work in publishing and dictionary publishing, no less, a lot of times we got very furious messages from the public claiming that they’d found an error.

And 99 times out of 100, it was not an error.

It was just like, oh, yeah, there’s a variant, British versus American or whatever.

And you’d write them back and say, here’s the evidence.

Okay, so that’s an error for sure.

But no matter how many editors you add to the process, there are always mistakes.

Now, you might say to yourself, well, I read a book and there were no errors in it.

And what I’m suspecting is when I find a book doesn’t have errors, almost always it’s a book that I really enjoyed.

It’s a book that caught me up.

The writing was beautiful.

The story was tremendous.

And I was just enthralled.

And I just probably glided over the errors and didn’t notice them because the book was so stupendous.

And so there were probably errors that I just missed.

So most books, nearly every book, has an error or two or many errors in it.

And so my point is to say errors are really ordinary because we’re human and we have failings.

And it’s really hard to get them out.

It’s really hard not to have errors.

Grant, I’m really glad to hear you say that because, Trevor, my first book had an error on the third page.

And it was so painful.

You know, here I am, 28 years old.

I’m so excited.

My first book ever.

And they spelled North Carolina, North Carolina.

And it was like three pages into the book.

I was just, I was devastated.

It was really painful.

I don’t remember anybody writing me about it.

But, you know, I mean, that one just was glaring.

It’s sort of like, you know, you talk to professional tennis players who don’t remember their big victories, but they remember their losses.

I used to keep a book about the history of computing, not because it was a particularly useful book to me, just because it had an error on the first page, on the first chapter, the first paragraph, and the first sentence.

Ouch.

And I just could tell because having been an editor, that was probably introduced by a last-minute edit.

Mm—

You know, they didn’t go through the usual checks.

Somebody just did it right before sending to print.

Anyway, Trevor, all this is, I’m just hoping to relieve your tension here.

Is it working?

Yes.

I mean, we need to be reminded we’re all human.

And, you know, we have books that we value, some we treasure.

And whenever you see that one thing, it just kind of puts a different spin on it.

It doesn’t lessen the value, but it does make one scratch your head.

All right.

So what do you do with the error when you find it?

Well, I reread it a few times to make sure I’m not missing something.

Good.

I may look at the front of the book to see when it was published, whether it was five years ago, 10 years ago or more, maybe a first edition or something.

And I may reconsider or review who the author is and what direction they were going in.

But still, if it’s just misspelled, I keep reading and I enjoy the book.

I just wonder if there’s anything I should do.

So here’s what you can do.

There’s a couple of things.

If it really galls you and you feel like you’re going to help the future editions of this book, that this book is so good that you are going to make the world and this author better, you can contact the publisher.

And I recommend you start.

Just go to their website.

Find maybe the publicity of the marketing people because they are used to dealing with the public and send them the super polite email.

What you want to do is say something like, I enjoyed your book.

Great fun.

What a treat.

By the way, there’s a little thing.

Thought you might want to know.

Keep them coming.

Looking forward to the next one.

You’re a faithful fan.

Blah, blah, blah.

And you’ve got to do that whole, like, butter their bread a whole bunch because writers have very tender souls.

And typically the publicity people know how to reach pretty much everyone in the company because they work with everyone in the company.

Typically the publicity and marketing people will get your message.

But be super polite and just say, look, I just thought you want to know if you reprint this, there’s an error that you might want to fix.

So you suggest using email rather than tweeting.

It’s sort of the same thing when you’re wondering about whether you should correct somebody’s grammar.

I mean, if you’re going to do that.

Private.

Privately.

Privately.

Yeah.

I mean, are you going to gain public points by tweeting it?

What do you get out of that?

I mean, if it’s the only way that you can reach them.

But what publisher doesn’t have a website, right?

They all have a website.

Right.

With an email address or a contact form, right?

Yeah.

So, Trevor, do you feel an obligation then to go forth and send emails to publishers now?

No, I think I’ll do what you said.

I’ll look to see, was it a reprint?

And it might have been, but I think I’ll just take it on a case-by-case basis.

As you pointed out, it is rare, but if there’s another printing on the horizon, on the agenda, then maybe that would help them.

So I really think I’ll just take it on a case-by-case basis, but it’s nice to know there’s something you can do, if nothing else, just to improve the future product.

One last thing.

If you read books on Kindle, I have been told that if you highlight passages in an e-book that you buy from the Kindle store, that publishers do see the aggregate highlighted passages, the ones that are highlighted the most by the readers, and do pay attention.

So if everyone highlights the errors a lot in books, it is possible that the editors will see that and perhaps correct the things when they notice that they’re highlighted because they’re wrong.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

Trevor, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Take care.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.