Launching mistakes on an unsuspecting public

Today I was reflecting on being published -- not the proud joy of seeing your name in print, but embarrassment when you realise your name is on an article or a book that contains mistakes, or a mistake. It doesn't have to be a huge factual error; even a spelling mistake, typo, or misplaced apostrophe can inspire that feeling of dread.
It is one of the risks of getting your writing published. Your mistakes can't be buried or forgotten; they are just there in print for everyone to see, deride and tut tut over. Certainly, sometimes these mistakes aren’t even your errors, but appear thanks to the editor or a publishing process; but they become yours when the piece comes out with your moniker.
It happens more often, of course, in magazines and newspapers with quick recurring deadlines, rather than in books where several people have read over the text during a long editing process. Although, many would recall Lonely Planet publishing a version of their Western Europe travel guide emblazoned on the spine with the misspelt title WESTEN Europe.
My introduction to that feeling of dread was at my first job fresh out of university, at a newspaper. It's not that my writing wasn't edited by the senior journalist; it's just he had happened to miss the fact that I had written "open to the pubic" instead of "open to the public".
It certainly taught me to read over my own work more carefully and be more responsible for what I have written. But the most important lesson to learn is that everyone makes mistakes and it's not the end of the world to find that you've missed the 'l' out of public (and perhaps made a few older people gasp at the rudeness). It certainly shouldn't stop you from going public (see!) with your writing in the future.
Perhaps one approach is to make light of it. Lonely Planet managed to turn their mistake into a humourous anecdote, including a funny self-deprecating bookmark with the book (click on pic to read) rather than bin their entire 40,000 copy print run, and as a result I know a couple of people who have held on to their erroneous copy of WESTEN Europe as a collector's item.

Anyway it's not the only thing that can go wrong. Later I’ll tell about what happened with the newspaper’s designer whipped up a cartoon about the circus to accompany a police report I had turned into a front page article (not recommended).

Suzanne Male is the publisher at Smink Works Books. She is contributing to The Writers' Resource Centre's book The Writer's Therapist, due out this September.

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