More than once in my tenure at Lifeway have I heard the quote: "Everyone needs an editor." Can I just emphasize the EVERYONE? Even editors need editors.
I’ve lived the results of not fully exercising the full value of that quote several times (OK—so maybe more than several) since I’ve worked here as an editor.
Today, we are going to take a break from the norm and talk about some funny typos or misses that we’ve caught or published here in Childhood Ministy Publishing.
A few years ago, my team worked really hard to publish the super-duper books. We were so excited when they came in. About 30 seconds after I had given Alyssa Reeves (then production editor) her copy, she came in an showed me the tab above. That’s right, in the first book that I had worked on for publication, and I had printed CHURCH incorrectly! Yikes!
In the same book we had another typo. We misspelled one of the contributors names. Jennifer told me how her daughter said she wanted to find something wrong in it. Jennifer told her that we were very conscientious at Lifeway and there were probably not many errors. Imagine Jennifer’s surprise when her daughter found we had misspelled her name!
Please note: The Super Duper Fun & Exciting, Absolutely Thought-Igniting Bible Activities for Kids (Babies thru Kindergarten Edition) was recently reprinted and the above errors are now history! Jennifer was supplied with a new copy with her name spelled correctly.
The above error came very close to being printed. Yikes. Can you imagine how hard it would be to find children for the other children to wave and move?
For most of you out there, you probably have fond memories of Game Day Central VBS! You might not have had such a fond memory if you had bought your visual pack and found this poster in it. Unfortunately, the word perfecter was printed pefecter.
For several days it was all-hands-on-deck, as we all gathered downstairs in our former shipping area to pull thousands of these posters from the cardboard tubes, add the new corrected poster, reroll the posters, and insert them back into the tubes. LOTS of paper cuts. It was a big event, but it was also fun because we got to spend time with each other!
Just this morning, we were planning birthday lunch for my friend and coworker, Cheryl, when we discovered another business’s typo. A local restaurant advertised via their facebook that ribeyes were $2.00 today in honor of its customers. Guess where we are going to lunch? Unfortunately, they printed a correction, but that didn’t deter us. We still love that restaurant. Since we too have felt the pain of unfortunate typos, we’ll let them off the hook.
Now it is your turn, tell me your "everyone needs an editor" moment.
