What happens if I spot an error in my book after it has been printed?

This is, sadly, very common. The severity of the problem can be major - such as a spelling mistake in the title on the front cover (sounds impossible but I’ve seen it happen). Or it could be something very small, such as a missing apostrophe in the middle of the book. Sometimes the pages are in the wrong order or the words run off the edge of the p^ag^e.

The first thing to remember is that mistakes happen to all publishers. It’s extremely rare for a book to be printed without a single mistake, and that goes for the largest publishers who have huge editorial teams whose job it is to make sure these things don’t happen. They do. Producing a book is a complex task. Even the process of fixing errors found prior to printing is fraught with risk: if the typesetter is asked to change a word it’s possible that a slip of the finger on the mouse could cause a whole line to be deleted at the same time. This could go unnoticed unless you are able to reread the entire book after every stage of correction.

The second thing to do is to identify whether the printer is at fault, or whether you are at fault. Faults

under your responsibility include services for which you hired freelancers, such as editing or typesetting. Faults in the text, layout or design are also your responsibility, even if you have hired a selfpublishing company to produce the book for you. They will make mistakes, as we all do, but you will have to inspect the book’s cover and insides before going to press and, if you’ve signed it off as being ready for printing, then you have to accept any errors that you failed to spot.

The good news is that if the fault can be traced to the printer then you are entitled to get the books reprinted for free. As the faulty books are of no value whatsoever to the printing company you can usually hang onto them, and if the fault is relatively minor there’s nothing to stop you selling those copies once you run out of good stock.

The first copy I took out of the box of the first book I self-published looked perfect until I opened it up. The first thirty-two pages had been repeated twice at the end of the book, and another chunk of thirty-two pages was missing entirely. My heart sank, and I nervously opened up some more copies from the print run of one thousand. Fortunately all of the others were fine. By a thousand-to-one chance I had picked out the only faulty copy from the print run. The printer had made an error in binding one copy.

Some lessons need to be learned from this:

1. Printers make mistakes. They do their best to weed out faulty books before delivering them to you, but since book manufacturing is done mainly by machinery, it's impossible to check every copy individually (unless you want to pay twice as much for the stock). Therefore in every print run you should expect a small amount of spoilage. It could be a printing error, which means too much or not enough ink on the page. It could be a binding error, where pages are in the incorrect order, missing, or duplicated, or a binding error involving the cover being glued on in slightly the wrong position so that the spine text isn't centred accurately. It could be a trimming error, where the guillotine used to trim the edges of the book is set at the wrong position and the books are trimmed at a weird angle, or too big or too small. Some trimming errors result in pages being stuck together at the top (where the giant sheets of paper have been folded to make smaller pages but not cut in the right place). It could be a transit problem, which is as simple as a box of books getting dropped causing damage to the stock or rainwater penetrating the box and soaking the books inside.

2. You should always flick through a book before sending it to a reviewer or mail order customer, just in case it's suffered from a printing or binding problem, and you should always expect that occasionally a customer will return a book to you complaining that it's faulty.

Errata slips

If an error exists in the printed book that is your fault but you don’t want to pay for a reprint, a simple solution is to print little errata slips listing the page and line number and the correct text. These slips can either be placed loose inside the front cover of each copy, glued in place, or printed on stickers and stuck on. Despite the fairly high incidence of errors in books, most authors choose not to use errata slips because they don’t want to draw attention to mistakes that perhaps might otherwise go unnoticed.

There are certain errors where errata slips are essential. Take the example of a recipe book in which the quantity of an ingredient reaches unhealthy levels due to a typing error. or a novel in which the wrong character name appears at a crucial moment, thus altering the intended story fundamentally -you wouldn’t want the bad guy riding off into the sunset with the heroine instead of the good guy, would you? What if your book is about health and the word ‘not’ is accidentally included in a statement about products that are harmful to the human body? In such cases the errata slip must be used if the stock is not going to be pulped and the book immediately reprinted.

Note that ‘errata’ should be used in the heading of the inserted note when listing more than one error; ‘erratum’ when there is a single error to correct.

Can I fix errors in a reprint?

If you spot an error in your book after it has been printed, but you feel confident that the original print run will sell out, you will have the opportunity to fix the error in a reprint. Don’t rush the typesetter to make the corrections because you might find that other errors will surface in the coming weeks as readers send you feedback. You won’t have to ask for feedback - usually it comes whether you want it or not, especially if there is an e-mail address in the book for them to contact you directly. Collate all of the corrections you want to make so that they can be entered at the same time into the page layout software and only one new PDF will have to be created.

When reprinting a book, get your typesetter to add ‘Reprinted’ and the year so that you can easily distinguish between the original edition and the corrected version.

If you’ve set up your book for print on demand and find a mistake, then the consequences are less severe. Amend your typeset file, or get your typesetter to fix it, and supply a fresh PDF to the print on demand company. However, they may charge you a fee for replacing the file they have in their system. It’s not their fault that you made a mistake in the first PDF, after all. Your typesetter may also charge you for making the alteration and the time spent creating the new PDF.