hayley.ws

Attention: This Book Is Full of Typos

A review of Jim F. Kukral’s “Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How to Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing to Increase Your Revenue”.

I have a thing for business books. I also have an absolute hatred for typos. Which is why this book pissed me off so much.

This book is all about getting attention.

I like the format. It’s split up enough that it makes it easy to jump in and out if you’re strapped for time. It’s also full of good tips and stories, that make it interesting to read.

But it is absolutely littered with typos.

my rant

Though I am using this book as a starting point because I just finished it, this epidemic of typos is by no means unique to this book.

Is there any respect left in the publishing industry for the printed book? Seriously.

Perhaps I’m an idealist, but I thought that the printed book was supposed to be something of value. I mean, this isn’t some document on the internet that can easily be corrected and “republished”. They do a print run of a book that has a bunch of typos and those books are now forever tarnished and can’t be fixed. That’s it. Game over. Can’t they see the finality in that?

how I classify typos

“Attention! This Book Will Make You Money” has every kind of typo except for the first group which sadly could indicate that a computer was the lone proofreader of this book.

the list

not as much as I thought

When I originally started going back through the book to find all of the typos I had notated, I felt sort of bad. The book wasn’t “littered” with typos at all. I wasn’t finding as many as I remembered seeing.

But that was the first 100 pages.

Which leads me to this theory that I’ve had because it seems like I’ve run into this a lot: the first part of a book will be fairly clean, but then there’s this huge increase in typos towards later parts of the book.

I have to figure that one of two things (or both) are happening in these circumstances.

  1. The first part of the book represents the time when the book writing was idyllic. The book was written joyfully and carefully crafted. Each word was important. But then the deadline neared and suddenly it was crunch time so the rest of the book just got kinda hammered out.
  2. There are proofreaders for these books but the more they read the book, the less focused they become, and the fewer typos they catch. Or maybe they have deadlines too and were procrastinating on finishing the book.

Dear John Wiley & Sons

You suck. I actually liked this book. But because of all of the typos, I will forever remember it as the book littered with typos, rather than the book that had some really great information and idea generators on how to get attention.

Somewhat paradoxically, the fact that I liked the book so much is why it’s left such a bad taste in my mouth.

See, had I not liked it, I would’ve quit reading it long ago. Which means I wouldn’t have encountered so many blatant typos. And then this book wouldn’t have become my perfect example of the downfall of the printed book.

I just don’t get it. Are publishers even utilizing proofreaders anymore? Or is a computer program the only thing giving the text a once-over before it’s sent off?

Yes, I’m over generalizing, because I do still read a fair amount of books that are nearly perfect (of the books I read, it’s quite rare to find one with zero typos).

Of course, maybe those books didn’t have proofreaders either. Maybe they were just lucky enough to have authors that were good at doing their own proofreading.

And if the lack of proofreaders is a money thing, I have two things to say to publishers.

  1. You expect me to place monetary value on something that you obviously didn’t value yourselves?
  2. I’ll bet you could find plenty of proofreaders who would be willing to work for just the cost of an advanced copy of the book. All you’re out at that point is the cost of the book/shipping and the cost of having lost a potential sale.

conclusion

I should point out that, to the author’s credit, if you ignore all the typos, it was actually pretty well written. I don’t remember running into any klutzy or confusing sentences, and if I were a different person, it would’ve been an absolute pleasure to read because I could’ve overlooked or completely missed all of the errors in the book.

But typos stick out to me. They greatly impact my ability to enjoy a book. Like how breaking the fourth wall in a TV show or movie can take you out of the story, typos constantly remind me that I’m reading a flawed book. If it’s fiction, errors take me out of the story. If it’s non-fiction, those errors make me start to seriously question what else is completely wrong that I’m not catching. In short, it ruins a book’s credibility for me.

So if you ask me about this book a year from now, I won’t remember the good bits.

I’ll remember that this book is full of typos.