Casting That First Stone

I'm not perfect when it comes to proofing my copy, as you no doubt have discovered. Then again, it's just me doing this. I don't have a team of people over here proofing the spelling or making sure I've got the correct words and that all of my tenses are correct.

It's just me. Which is why I get so frustrated when I read books with easy to fix errors. For instance, at the moment, I'm reading the two books that are out on Roger Clemens, American Icon by the investigative team at the New York Daily News, and The Rocket That Fell To Earth by former Sports Illustrated, and ESPN The Magazine journalist Jeff Pearlman. And both of these books have errors which I easily spotted, and errors which any proof reader and/or fact checker should have been able to catch.

For instance, it's JIMY Williams, not JIMMY Williams. I know it looks funny. But that's how the guy spells his name. Yet both books go with JIMMY. And to me, this kind of hurts the credibility of the authors as that's an easily verifiable fact. Just use Google. And in American Icon, the authors write about Clemens's emotional 2003 World Series farewell in Tampa. The only problem is that the Clemens's emotional 2003 World Series farewell was in Miami, not Tampa. And the authors know this because, just pages earlier, they had talked about his emotional 2003 World Series farewell in Miami.

Like I said, I'm not perfect. I'm always getting spellings wrong. Or using bit instead of big -- thanks, Fred. But then again, like I'm said. It's just me over here. I don't have any paid editors or fact checkers on my non-existent staff. But the publishing houses for these books do, so someone should check this stuff.