Book errors – Though, as an author, you seek perfection, it always eludes you

AFTER TEN MONTHS of working together on his book, a client and I finished it in mid-January. As the editor and designer, I hit Amazon/KDP’s “Publish My Book” button, then sent him a congratulatory message.

“We have liftoff!”

The author texted me the next morning. “Good news: the book is up on Kindle. Bad: the cover is an old version.”

My stomach lurched like a balky elevator. In place of what should have been a scintillating endorsement for his book were my placeholder words:

“Blah, blah, blah.”—Joe Blow

Literally. Just like that, for 7.9 billion people in the world to see on the Amazon storefront. What’s more, in the full-cover photograph, two people I’d Photoshopped onto a coastal rock appeared to be levitating above that rock as if landing in invisible hovercrafts.

Sigh.

Today, strap on your headlamp and let me take you into the deep, dark underbelly of book errors. Every new book, when opened or downloaded, emits the essence of perfection. And yet, as an author and editor, I’ve seen a book’s seamier side. Readers see a new house; I see the shims I used to make it level, which, of course, it never will be.

Just when you think a book is error-free, it’s not. Just when you think the statute of limitations is up for finding mistakes, it isn’t. A reader mentions that you wrote “Middle Fork Kings Creek” and it should be “Middle Fork Kings River.” That you wrote “suggested” when you should have written “suggesting.”

Books seem to breed mistakes. My latest release, Seven Summers (And a Few Bummers): My Adventure Hiking the 2,650-Mile PCT, has 425,111 characters, all of which need to be the right symbol in the right place at the right time. About 90,000 words, all of which can’t just be “on the board” (as in corn hole) but must be “in the hole” (as in golf).

But sometimes interlopers get by you and your editors; witness all the “fixes” marked by colorful sticky notes (mine) and torn paper (a fellow PCT hiker) in the photo up top. By now, I have probably read the ending fifty times, including the narration for an audiobook, which is a great way to discover errors—but, as you’ll see, not foolproof. A handful of editors combed through my book like search-and-rescue teams looking for words that had lost their ways, for example “exalts” masquerading as “exults.” And a few thousand readers have read the book. But not until two weeks ago—four months after the book came out—did Ted Knopp of Creswell point out to me that instead of describing a time of day as “six-forty-three” I had mistakenly written “sixty-forty-three.”

Like the Japanese soldier who hid in the jungles of Guam for nearly three decades, not realizing World War II had long since ended, the “ty” of “sixty” had gone undetected by us all. If it intended to stay hidden, it had done a remarkable job, then along came the sharp-eyed Knopp.

BOOK ERRORS COME in all sizes, shapes and embarrassments, among them:

—Misspellings, yes, even with computer spell-checkers, one of which pleaded with me to change the name of friend/trailhead driver Mike Yorkey to Mike Turkey.

—Wrong words. See “exult” (“feel or show triumphant elation or jubilation”) vs. “exalt” (“hold someone or something in very high regard”).

—Style. Most book editors try to conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, which will tell you that it’s “General Washington” (“general” spelled out when you use just the rank and last name) but “Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Bluster (“general” abbreviated when you use rank and a full name.)

—Punctuation. Yes, Virginia, though rare, there are times when a period should come after an ending quotation mark.

—Levitated couples on book covers overlaid on “Blah, blah, blah” placeholders.

—And, of course, the granddaddy of them all: fact errors.

In Seven Summers, I have a one-page chart alone that has 255 facts in it. I have two dozen maps, each of which lists about 50 mountains, meadows, lakes, parks, passes, rivers, streams, creeks, highways, trailheads, towns and, at times, states and countries. That’s 1,200 facts alone for maps: places that need to be spelled right, “styled” right, located in the right position and not bumping up against each other. (I can’t imagine what they would have looked like had Jim Meacham, a friend and co-editor of The Atlas of Oregon, not offered me—and given me—a 90-minute edit. Still, blame me, not him, for any remaining errors!)

If an average page has two dozen facts, it’s fair to say that the 373-page book has close to 10,000 facts in it, all of which must be correct. Now, not all books are so thick with such. Take Marley & Me, the wildly successful 2005 book about a family and their dog; that’s a book with only hundreds of facts, some of which could be wrong and readers probably wouldn’t notice.

But Seven Summers is about a public trail that thousands have hiked: names, distances, mileage markers, locations, descriptions, the works. Paul Willis, a retired English teacher from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, pointed out I’d gotten Mica Lake, Fire Creek, Milk Creek and Kennedy Creek out of order in Northern Washington; it was among his wife’s favorite hiking stretches when they had lived in Spokane.

Some mistakes are so obscure they will get by lots of readers; I try to edit for the Westmont College retired English teachers out there, although, obviously, even that’s not always good enough.

In real life, I tend to be an optimist. But in book life, I tend to be a fatalist. Hearing word of one mistake eats at me. Turns me into a one-bulb-goes-out-and-the-whole-string-goes-out guy, i.e., one error turns light into darkness. I brood. I beat myself up. And then I calm down and remind myself: You asked for it, pal.

I had done something at the back of Seven Summers that I’d never done before in a book: I invited readers to show me the errors of my ways. I wouldn’t have done so but just before completing Seven Summers, I’d read a wonderful book by Robert Moor called On Trails: An Exploration. And he did that in an Author’s Note at the back, writing:

As [Walt] Whitman once wrote, this book is intended as “an exploration, as of new ground, wherein, like other primitive surveyors, I must do the best I can, leaving it to those who come after me to do much better.” After disclosing to readers how he had reorganized the order of events in his book, Moor then wrote, “With any errors that you happen to encounter, please feel free to report them to [me] so that over time the book can continue to improve.”

I admired his humility and his thinking; ignoring errors might placate an author who believes ignorance is bliss, but doing so also ensures that the writer’s book will forever be sprinkled with inaccuracies. So, I followed suit, reminding myself that the error game is a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later proposition. At some point, your extra “ty” is going to be flushed out of the jungle by some reader.

Of course, it’s also a be-careful-for-what-you-wish-for proposition, particularly when an eagle-eyed friend from high school’s list of corrections—18, but who’s counting?—is so substantial she feels compelled to include it as an attached Word doc. Then again, about half her findings had not been errors I knew of, so I was grateful for her contributing to my book’s accuracy, even it added to my sense of authorial humiliation.

In all, a couple of dozen people have notified me about errors; I’ve updated the book nearly 10 times, one of the beauties of print-on-demand technology. A former newspaper colleague from Montana reminded me that while Judy Collins did sing the 1970 song “Time Passes Slowly,” Bob Dylan wrote it and sang it first. Whoops. And a writing pal from San Diego, a guy I met at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism 50 years ago, pointed out that it’s La Quinta, California, not Laquinta. (Chuck Duncan, our Reporting I teacher at UO, must be rolling his eyes at me—and smiling at Yorkey as if Mike were his star student. Not that I’m bitter.)

BOOK ERRORS HAPPEN for myriad reasons, foremost among them human fallibility, fatigue and minds so convinced of your good intentions as an author that you more easily overlook mistakes. You know what you intended for the sentence to say, so like the driver who runs over a squirrel and rationalizes it was only a rock to avoid facing the pain, you trick yourself into believing that you said what you wanted to say, not what you actually said. Or, similarly, you so firmly believe in a fact that you don’t second guess it; alas, it was author and environmentalist John Muir, not photographer Ansel Adams, who first called the High Sierra the “range of light.”

Nobody’s perfect. Omar Visquel botched 183 balls hit to him from 1995 to 2012. But he successfully fielded .9847 percent of those, the best fielding mark ever for a major league shortstop. My point? Success never makes it through unscathed.

We’re not only human, we’re tired—at least if we’re authors editing late in the book-writing process. Book-writing is surprisingly emotional, particularly if the book itself is emotional in nature. It can drain you. Month after month and, at times, year after year. But the process demands that you be at your sharpest at the end, when you’re scanning for “fixes” despite being physically and emotionally parched.

What’s more, unlike writing itself, editing isn’t much fun—at least not for me. Fact-checking is the literary equivalent of doing plumbing in a crawl space: critical, laborious but not particularly fulfilling.

Sometimes you need to make a last-minute change, and last-minute changes lend themselves to last-minute mistakes. On the August 2023 day I was to hit “send” to post the final version of Seven Summers on Amazon, I was en route to Cascade Locks to hike south on the PCT with my brother-in-law Glenn. Just as we left—sister-in-law and chief editor Ann at the wheel with She Who in the passenger seat beside her—I received an email with a glowing endorsement for the book from New York- and Austin-based Kirkus Reviews.

I grabbed my laptop and, in the backseat, as we were heading up Interstate 5, began trading out my original cover quote for the one from Kirkus. The jiggly high-wire act got even dicier when we stopped at Eagle Creek near Cascade Locks to replicate a 1974 photo taken of the four of us at that very spot.

Over dinner at a restaurant in Cascade Locks, in a procedure that took ninety minutes because of snail-slow internet, I added the photo, wrote a cutline and jumped through Amazon’s myriad hoops to officially post the book—somewhere between my fish and my chips. I was lucky: no errors involving my additions.

But that’s not always the case. Sometimes you botch things in far less stressful conditions. The most painful book error I ever made came when I’d finished 52 Little Lessons from Les Misérables and slunk into a long-awaited slumber—only to realize I’d forgotten to do the Acknowledgments, whose deadline was the next day. I hurriedly threw them together, only learning when the book was published that I’d misspelled the first name of my Les Miz editor and niece, Molly—not Mollie—Petersen, who was steeped in French history. How sadly ironic: misspelling the name of the person who had saved me from hundreds of errors. Informing her of my mistake was one of the most difficult phone calls I’ve ever made, her sense of character—and grace—evident when she burst out laughing.

Among the two errors that have stuck with me longest were in another book in that series, 52 Little Lessons from It’s a Wonderful Life. I somehow managed to leave out one of George and Mary’s four children, Tommy. Not only that, but I also wrongly assumed that, it being winter in New York, Zuzu’s flower was a construction-paper knockoff made at school.

I was reminded that the flower was real by no other than the woman who played Zuzu, Karolyn Grimes, whom I had interviewed over the phone and later took to breakfast when she appeared at a gift show in Eugene. She was not happy about my screw-up. I loved the story, revered the movie and I wrote the book, and yet there I was, feeling like the inscription on my life’s title page should read, “No man is a failure who has friends. But to leave out a Bailey kid and say Zuzu’s flower was fake—well, that’s pretty low, mister!”

The theme of authors and editing recalls the C.S. Lewis quote about God and people: “We’re like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of the chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.”

Or as perfect as we can expect to be. I figure that of the 90,000 words I wrote for Seven Summers’ first edition (September 10, 2023), roughly 89,900 were right. That’s a .9988 fielding percentage, comparable to shortstop Visquel’s .9847.

In the end, we each do what we can to live right, be right, and write right. Then, as Whitman suggests, we must leave it to those who come after us “to do much better.”

NOTE TO PAID SUBSCRIBERS: Please use the Leave a Comment button to let me know what errors I made in this piece. (I can hardly wait!) And stay tuned for information about a writers’ workshop that I’m offering March 9 here in Eugene. It will focus on writing memoirs.

NOTE TO FREE SUBSCRIBERS: Occasionally, I send a column to everyone, as I did with this one. If you want to receive all my weekly columns, plus gain access to the archives that contain all my columns since I began this venture Jan. 5, click on “Subscribe Now” below. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year.

  Former (Eugene) Register-Guard columnist. Author of 21 books. Latest: “Seven Summers (And a Few Bummers): My Adventure Hiking the 2,650-Mile PCT.” Ex-adjunct prof of journalism at the UO School of Journalism & Communication. Lives in Eugene.