/ Mark Frauenfelder / 12:32 pm Thu Sep 15, 2011

Typo in romantic novel causes bowel movement during love scene

201109151230"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," writes Susan Andersen. "Shifted -- he SHIFTED!" (Via Arbroath)

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  3. If “2 girls 1 cup” is any indication, there is a certain demographic that was pleased (or more appropriately “thrilled”) with the typo.

  5. Come on, no need to make fun of the publishers of this book over one little consonant, at least they didn’t seem to have trouble with their bowels. 

  7. And now, of course, the magic ad pixies have chipped in their tuppence worth.  “Is incontinence a problem?  Try the free sample pack!”, says the Depend advert at the top of the page …

    I think I have to lie down for a bit …

    1. Wouldn’t be a mood killer if the editor had changed the last two words in the sentence to “her chest.” That would be just be hot and steamy.

  14. “ God, I am so appalled, not to mention horrified that anyone would think that’s what I wrote. I’d really appreciate it if you would forward this to your romance reading friends…”

    A typo in the ebook version of the book (not the printed version, thank god, according to Amazon), in a paragraph perfectly composed for maximum hilarity and repostability? Kudos.

  18. He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground. “Impressive,” she offered, to which the man replied with a single grunt. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Sanchez,” he growled. “Sanchez Steamer. You can call me ‘Cleveland.’ Now how about you shut the door? I’d like a little privacy in here.”

    “But, Sanchez,” she countered, “there is no door. You’re a drunken hobo, pooping in my boxwood hedge.”

  21. Well! This is ONE novel way to increase sales in one’s eBook.  I’m going straight to this title RIGHT this minute!  GREAT marketing ploy, Susan.  Uhhh…Janet sticking with you on this one??

  22. Really, people? I honestly thought scatological humour like this would be beneath…Oh, who am I kidding? RJ, man, You’re killing me here. I can’t breathe.

  24. He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground.  “Damn”, he said to himself.  “I knew I should have thrown out the rest of that curry from last week”.

    1. Reminds me of a typo I missed in a travel magazine I was editing.  “Thousands of exciting discounts” was published (over 1,000,000 times) as “Thousands of exciting discocunts”

  29. Gah. I presume this was due to an OCR fail? Why oh why do they OCR texts instead of using the original manuscripts? *Especially* for texts that have been written using a word processor?

    1. Because Harper Collins does their own e-book conversion internally, and they don’t really care about quality of the electronic deliverable because they are a publisher. I wouldn’t be surprised if they simply run off image-based PDFs and then, when they realized “oops!,” they just did a basic dirty OCR with no cleanup involved.

      I wouldn’t be surprised if this author, who no doubt has the original manuscript, had no part in the ebook creation process. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Harper simply gets the eBook from their printing company.

      1. What I’d love to know is what is the contractual cut Harper got on the ePub editions?  Not sure what the template-contract says on this issue ‘nowadays’…but…as an Indie PubCoach I would love to know.   info at avharrison dash publishing dot com

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