It is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment you open your newly published book, your eye will land on a typo as ugly and obvious as a pimple on the end of a nose.
I call this the publication paradox, because it doesn’t matter how many passes you make over your manuscript beforehand. The offending pimple stays hidden until the exact second you hit publish, at which point it reveals itself in full, shining glory. You’ll have read that page a hundred times. A thousand, maybe. And still, there it is.
Sometimes the typo is buried deep in the manuscript, and fine, you can almost forgive yourself for that one. But here’s the statistic that should really unsettle you: eighty percent of the time, it’s on the first page. That page. The one you agonized over more than any other, the one you could probably recite from memory at this point.
Nobody knows exactly why this happens. Some people think it’s because the first page becomes so familiar to you that you stop seeing what’s actually on it and start seeing what you expect to be there. Others blame something closer to a digital imp living inside your manuscript, one with a wicked sense of humor, waiting until you’ve labeled the file “final” before rearranging a letter or two just to watch you suffer.
I’m inclined to believe the imp theory, because when it happened to me, it didn’t happen quietly. It happened on the first word of the first sentence of the first page. The foreword of my short story collection, Idolatry: Eight Tales of the Far Future, should begin with the word “I.” Instead, it begins with two of them. “I I.” Two eyes staring back at me from the very first line of my very first page.
I’ll admit, for a moment I considered pretending it was intentional. Two eyes, two selves, the self we show the world and the one we keep hidden. It’s not the worst reading. But no amount of clever justification stopped me from wincing every single time I opened that book.
If it’s any comfort, you’re in good company. In a 1631 reprint of the King James Bible, during the transcription of the Ten Commandments, the word “not” was dropped from “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Readers were instead informed, with the full authority of scripture, that they should. It became known as the Wicked Bible, and I like to imagine it’s the reason all books since have been cursed to the same fate. A kind of publisher’s original sin.
None of this helps me, of course, because right now I’m sitting down to prepare the second, and truly final this time, edition of that same collection. I’ve carried that two-eyed pimple around for long enough, and it needed to go. So I figured, while I’m in there, I might as well hunt down whatever else is lurking in the manuscript.
I’m doing this fully aware it’s a fruitless exercise. When I finally decide it’s done, when I press publish again, when the new author copies land on my doorstep and I crack one open, the paradox will not have granted me immunity. New pimples will sprout in places I swear I checked a hundred times.
And when they do, I’ll have two good options. I can let it wreck my week, or I can accept that this is simply the tax you pay for putting something into the world instead of keeping it locked away where it can stay flawless forever, unread by anyone at all.
I know which one I’m choosing. I’d suggest you do the same.