$20,000 typo

How bad does a typo have to be for you to reprint 7,000 copies of a book? Here's an article about how a recipe in Pasta Bible called for "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of pepper. An understandable auto-correct mistake, but apparently people at the Penguin Group Australia thought it was bad enough that they were willing to reprint thousands of books, which cost $20,000.

Would you have reprinted those books? I'm sure anyone who read that book would realize that it's just a typo. Or, (gasp!) could it be some genius marketing ploy to get pepper -- I mean people -- to pay attention to the book?

Interesting...

In any case, typos suck. I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and got really frustrated with the number of typos in this pretty high-profile book. My high school newspaper advisor told us, "If you can't get the spelling or grammar right, how can anyone trust anything in our newspaper?" True.

It's a good thing, though, that I don't have to worry about my typos being worth thousands of dollars, that is until my career as a children's book author takes off...