The Typo Myth

Much debate rages about the validity of self-published books.  It is widely assumed by their detractors that they are filthy with typos, errors and formatting issues.  Well, I'm here to tell you that is a fallacy.  In the last couple of years I have developed the odd habit of listing the typos and other problems that I find in self-published books with the intent of proactively helping fellow writers improve their product.  At some point it occurred to me that I should do the same when I read a traditionally published book.

When Charles Franklin blogged a good article  by Heidi Loney about the vitriol being leveled at self-published books by the traditional publishing community, I realized that I had a unique body of data to prove or disprove the matter.  Recalling lists of errata for twenty-nine books, I divided it into groups having twenty-four self-published and five traditionally published books.  Without showing the titles, this is the result:

Self-published	Traditionally published
	17
5
15
11
87
1
	22
	13
31
20
35
20
21
12
	9
4
14
	0
5
7
22
49
6
13
6
5
13
2
12
Totals                         416	61

Self-published books averaged 17.3 typos compared to 12.2 in the traditionally published works.  Note that one self-published book contained 87 problems and one traditionally published had zero (it was a coffee table book with a fair amount of text).  If we consider those two books anomalies and take them from the list, the average changes to 14.3 per self-published and 15.25 per traditionally published.  Thus proving the technical inferiority of self-published books is a myth.

So!  Put that in your Kindle and smoke it.

Incidentally, my reviews and usually the word count for each of these books is either on this blog or on the reviews page at www.ScottSkipper.com.