Mistakes in books

Honestly there is so much wrong with The Dinner Guest that ‘sew his wild oats’ ranks low down on my list of complaints.

The ending makes the introduction of one of the female characters totally nonsensical and I’m still mad about it.

Could this be a sign of standards slipping in schools?

When it's punctuation, quite possibly.

Sometimes mistakes in titles, police etc are made by American authors and the UK publisher hasn't picked them up. But UK authors are guilty too.

Classics don’t get changed post-humously. Any ‘mistakes’ like this (not typos etc) stand for eternity!

A book I read last year had several paragraphs about the protagonist, who had a new baby, struggling to get a taxi home because she couldn't afford.a baby car seat.

Fair enough, set the scene pretty well.

Taxi journey - used to insert some backstory, again, fair enough.

Protagonist gets home - first thing she does is put the baby car seat down. Yes, that's right - the car seat the extensive opening scene was based around her being unable to afford to buy.

I can understand the author originally drafting scene with car seat and then going back and adding the stuff about being unable to buy one to add realism to the character's plight, but surely an editor should have spotted it somewhere along the way (this was a traditionally published book, not self-pub).! I spotted it straight away.

The worst mistake I noticed was in a Hemingway novel which are supposed to be classics so you think would be edited well. A female character who is English says some dialogue referring to herself as Scottish. And it’s not that they meant British instead of English as this character has a friend who is Scottish, and they even make a joke about Scottish people hating English.

Newspaper articles usually contain mistakes that don't get picked up by spellcheckers.

Common ones are pallet/palette/palate, councillor/counselor, calve/carve, bare/bear etc

Could this be a sign of standards slipping in schools?

Titles. So often wrong. When it should be Lady Smith and when it should be Lady Jane. Or when neither of those is correct and it should be Lady Peter. Similarly Lord John/Lord Smith. Among other errors.

And when an author of crime fiction seems to have no clue abut the police and criminal justice system in England and doesn't seem to think it worth bothering to find out.

And I read one not-self-published book in which the dialogue was punctuated wrongly throughout - 'Blah blah blah blah', said John. Set my teeth on edge each time I saw it.

These are all in books in long series by well-regarded authors.

I am a regular library customer and I obviously have the same taste in books as a regular pedant.

I often come across books with pencilled corrections in the margins. As for perceived Americanisms...

It's very entertaining but I just hope the library staff don't think it's me writing all over the books.

I read a book in translation recently (originally in Korean) which kept some Korean words in - one word was used repeatedly and was incorrect. It really bugged me because surely if you weren’t a fluent Korean speaker you would double check with someone who was? I picked it up quickly and I’m not even fluent!

I’ve always thought that it must be a secret publishing tradition or superstition to include a mistake in each book, as I always find one 😁

I read a Jane Fallon book recently in which she mentioned two or three times that a character was an only child - and then in a later chapter she mentioned his sister. I couldn’t believe nobody had picked that up.

If I embroidered quickly enough I would design a little pincushion with a picture of some stalks of oats, and then I would sew some oats that had been sown a few months earlier.

I do wonder if whoever gives out the "bestseller" blurb has even read the book.

Just on this point - the people who give blurbs on books (‘Astonishing … the best book I’ve read this year’ Famous Author) have read an advance uncorrected proof copy about 6-9 months in advance of publication. Any errors they see then they expect will be sorted by the proofread - sometimes they’re even reading pre-copyediting. And they’re all either mates with the new author, share an agent or editor or have some other connection that gives a vested interest!

Many self-publishers these days invest in high quality editing, and many traditional publishers don’t. (I work in publishing, though in non-fiction.)
If you read on a Kindle you can click and report the error fairly easily. Otherwise many readers e-mail.
Having said that, few emails highlight actual errors as most reports are wrong. Some are unintentionally funny, though.
I’ve had 6–7 reports on my approx. 200 titles over the years and none were correct.

Publishers keep an errata file so do send a list of page numbers and line numbers to the email address on their website & the errors will get updated in future printings and pretty much immediately in the ebook.

Don’t tell the author about typos - tell the publisher. Fair enough if it’s a plot point or fact-checking error but not for typos. Most authors won’t thank you - 1) they’ll only have to tell their publisher anyway so cut out the middleman and 2) if it’s a bestseller you’re almost certainly not the first person to point it out so imagine what getting that post feels like repeatedly.

Woops,I could lie and say I did it deliberately, how embarrassing!!!

I was reading a book in order to write a review it for a website about 10 years ago. I really enjoyed it but did spot something that wasn't central to the plot but really troubled me. At a New Year party to welcome in 1929, a group of characters talk about literary suicides, and mention a very well known English writer whose death wasn't until December 1941, and whose 1930s work etc is quite a significant part of their literary output. I had an Advance Reader's Copy uncorrected proof so I emailed the author's UK and US publishers just in case they could sort it and got a very grateful email forwarded back to me, offering to buy me a drink. It was 10 years ago but if I ever get to an event where he's speaking, I totally mean to approach him.

@nannybeach - oooops 😂