There is a time-honored rule in publishing: “No matter how many times it’s been proofread by no matter how many people, there is always one more stupid and embarrassing typo that will slap you right in the face the moment you open the finished and printed book.”
STUPEFYING STORIES 23 is no exception to that rule. Dammit.
Fortunately we no longer need to wait until the next print run to fix such things; we can do so fairly easily and quickly. Rather than try to keep quiet about our mistakes, then, we’ve decided to make this an audience-participation feature. If you find a typo in one of our books, please post it in the comments here, along with sufficient information to help us find it and fix it in the next upload.
We will be watching who makes the most and best comments. The winner(s) will receive free ARC copies of our next book, so that they can get a head start on proofreading that.
I’ll kick things off with the typo that smacked me in the face the moment I opened up SS#23.
“A few words from the editor...” paragraph 3, Still, it’s been so long since we released Stupefying Stories 22 that is seems like
D’oh!
—Bruce Bethke
By email from Karl:
ReplyDelete"The Secret of Erin Stewart," paragraph beginning "What was wrong with her?" The last line in the paragraph: "You are being incredibly cavalier, young lady. This is serious"
The young lady is missing a period? This is serious!
By IM from Sharon:
ReplyDelete"The Secret of Erin Stewart," paragraph beginning, "I could think way." Missing "of a"
By IM from Sharon:
ReplyDelete"The Last Feast of Silas the Wizard"
"When arrived at the library..." Missing pronoun 'she'
"This one of the last places he worked openly before he died." Missing verb 'is' or 'was'
"Curtsey" or "curtsy"? Both are used in different places.
"Steward was here not five minutes' ago," he said. Either missing a noun or the apostrophe on 'minutes'' is a mistake.
"Hand we that, will you?"
This is a great idea. And the typos already listed tell me I've been enjoying my reading of SS#23 way too much, because I've missed a lot of these.
ReplyDeleteI've read up to page 169 and found 14 typos so far, so I'll wait until I've finished to send you my list.
@Arisia - Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAnd a helpful hint to all bug hunters: now that the book is built, we can search the entire text very quickly and easily. If you can include a fairly unique word or string associated with the typo -- e.g., 'cavalier' or 'When arrived at', it makes it very easy for us to find and fix the bug.