The typos were deliberately put there to make me feel all “smartical” this morning? Thank God, Helen — I thought I was going to have to give free edits this morning. I am loathe to do that before coffee, but as we both know, a skilled editor is worth her weight in gold. What writer worth spit wouldn’t prefer to have the tough love dished out by an editor before walking out into the world with proverbial toilet paper dangling from his shoe?
Most of my typos come from Finngelo IV, my phone. (It named itself, by the way; I was playing with predictive text, and somehow “Finngelo” came out. This is the fourth Samsung-branded phone, therefore, IV.) Finngelo III once guest authored a blog post for me: https://jahangiri.us/2017/finngelo-iii-silly-interview-with-a-smartphone/
I published a manual, once — both online and in hardcopy — that details how to remove and replace a 5.5" hard drive. There was no such thing (it was 5.25"). This was not a critical error; I imagine your “milligrams” vs. “grams” haunts you even more than this does, me. I finally came to terms with it, and now feel peace in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may have smirked and felt smugly superior for a few moments before being worn down by the events of their own day — a conclusion, I see, that you also came to.
I did once call someone out for an anonymous review (not on Amazon) and said that I truly hoped taking some stranger on the Internet down a peg had made him feel just a tiny bit better about himself and allowed him to go about his day without yelling at his kid sister or kicking the dog, and that I truly hoped he’d have a better day tomorrow. I had nailed it; I got a sincere apology in return. He was a teen, and indeed he had had a rotten day in school and at home. It’s just too bad about such things having the power to influence sales on Amazon, especially when it should be clear that the faceless horde hasn’t even read the book!
There is another side to this, of course. A fellow writer once left a glowing review of a book I’d published, and I bought her book hoping to do the same for her. After reading hers — a tepid retelling of a handful of commonly known urban legends, in which she had inexplicably gone from “large print” to “so large you can barely fit ten words on a 6”x9" page” — I decided that NOT leaving a review at all was the only kindness I could possibly give her after the $10 cover price. This is why I hate reviewing other authors’ books at all, since I think reviews are best left in the hands of readers, for the benefit of other readers.
Having said that, I wouldn’t be above pointing out the typos in a review, since it is when we nitpick others’ spelling and grammar in public that our own, invariably, goes to Hell in a hand-basket.
