In my youth, like when I was a new teenager, I would find typos in books and think, 'Oh my god, they left a typo in here. How could that happen?' The outrage, the indignation!
Okay, so flash forward twenty-mumble years, and I'm a writer and an editor. I still get really distressed about typos and so forth. But then I go through the process of preparing a book for publication. Not just developmental editing but copy editing and proofreading, book layout, managing writers and artists, overseeing changes to covers, and all the million other things that have to happen before a book can be released.
Lo and behold, my point of view has changed somewhat. If someone finds one typo in the book and tells me, 'oooo, there's one typo. You need a better editor," I'm probably going to laugh out loud. Do you know how many typos 28 people from 10 different countries leave in a manuscript, even after the thirtieth set of revisions? It would be like your stodgy old aunt coming to your house with white gloves on and discovering dust in the one place you didn't, for some reason, get to.
I still have no tolerance for typos, but I see how one might get through in a whole novel. So much other work has to be done on it that it's actually a miracle there's not one in every chapter. So thank your lucky stars if you buy a book that has no typos at all. The fact that this happens consistently is proof of the professionalism of the publishing industry. No joke.
Okay, so flash forward twenty-mumble years, and I'm a writer and an editor. I still get really distressed about typos and so forth. But then I go through the process of preparing a book for publication. Not just developmental editing but copy editing and proofreading, book layout, managing writers and artists, overseeing changes to covers, and all the million other things that have to happen before a book can be released.
Lo and behold, my point of view has changed somewhat. If someone finds one typo in the book and tells me, 'oooo, there's one typo. You need a better editor," I'm probably going to laugh out loud. Do you know how many typos 28 people from 10 different countries leave in a manuscript, even after the thirtieth set of revisions? It would be like your stodgy old aunt coming to your house with white gloves on and discovering dust in the one place you didn't, for some reason, get to.
I still have no tolerance for typos, but I see how one might get through in a whole novel. So much other work has to be done on it that it's actually a miracle there's not one in every chapter. So thank your lucky stars if you buy a book that has no typos at all. The fact that this happens consistently is proof of the professionalism of the publishing industry. No joke.
RSS Feed
