by Anura Guruge
on July 29, 2021
The book in question:
I continually joke that MY middle name is ‘typo‘. Yes, I cannot write without typos. In the case of my books, despite all my efforts & those of numerous (paid) proofers (of varying competency), I still end up with more than I would like. But, trust me when I say I try so hard to eradicate as many as I can.
Yes, the famed ‘James Michener‘ too plagued by this problem. He talked about it in his autobiography: ‘The World Is My Home‘. How he would invariably find at least one typo as soon as any of his books got published — despite his books having gone through at least 6 editors. Wow. I have never had the fortune to have more than 3. So, in a way, I shouldn’t complain. In a way this book by Palgrave — MacMillan is in the same boat — so to speak. How can professional (highly-paid) editors miss such howlers? Not cricket.
The two shown above are so plain but egregious that it just confounds I.
How?
The first 5 of my 34 (sole-author) books were published by big name houses. The first three were diligently produced by them. They fixed nearly all of my typos. Not so with the last two. I was so angry. They just didn’t care. Appears that this was the case with this book too. MacMillan just did NOT care. Shame.
Here is another example. Not as bad. But, it was jarring. The same was kind of true of the whole book. The material was decent enough, but the style — despite one of the co-authors being a professional journalist — was ‘choppy’. It was readable, but in places it required effort.
Well, we all know how that goes…you can look at a page ten thousand times and completely overlook the obvious….I’ve done it myself.
But you’d think a big publishing house would employ talented people (or more likely nowadays, talented software) to weed out stuff like this.
Mark,
That is my whole point. A BIG publishing house EMPLOYS multiple editors, who do it in an iterative way, to fix such things. Crazy that such big ones get through. Michener was saying his books went through 6- to 7-ROUNDS of editing once he submitted a manuscript & that he would have done multiple rounds before he gave it to them. Then he would find a typo on day 1 of publication. So, I don’t feel too bad about my efforts. SMILE. Thanks.