Telling Typos

I’ve been reading a self-published e-book. I didn’t realize it was self-published when I bought it. If I had, I would have thought twice before buying. I know lots of great books are self-published. But books vetted by agents and publishers are more likely to be good. 

In this case, there’s no doubt a traditionally published book would have been better edited. This one was riddled – absolutely riddled – with errors, averaging a major boo-boo every page or two. After some soul-searching, I decided not to mention the title, mainly because Amazon customers have already ripped the author for the mistakes in their reviews and the author herself replied. She apologized to readers wrote that the book went through six different edits and she has no idea how all those errors got in. Her best guess is that the wrong file got sent to the publisher. And whether or not that’s true, she’s had enough humiliation.

But I bring it up today because the types of errors were interesting. Some were the careless mistakes everyone makes while writing. Missing punctuation. A wrong word (“no suck luck” where she clearly meant “no such luck”). A “your” where it should have been “you’re.”

Anyone whose mind is preoccupied with dreaming up story and dialogue and characters can easily make those mistakes. But other mistakes were more damning. They were made not in haste but because, quite clearly, the writer didn’t know any better. Even if the author had cleaned up all the typos, these errors would have tipped her hand that the book wasn’t professionally edited. They’re the stuff editors know and most other people don’t:

1. “Everyday” as a noun phrase. The one-word “everyday” is an adjective, “everyday values.” The noun phrase is two words: “We’ll visit every day.”

2. Repeated instances of “door jam” and no instances of the correct “door jamb.”

3. She “would pour over maps for hours.” This is one editors watch out for. It should be “pore.”

4. Consistent use of one-word “awhile” after “for.” The one-word form is an adverb and, as such, can’t be used as a noun that’s the object of a preposition. So you can “stay awhile” or “stay for a while,” but you can’t “stay for awhile.”

To me, those mistakes are a dead giveaway that no professional editor was involved – at least not in the version I paid good money for.