The Golden Pencil: The Freelance Writer’s Resource

Even Harry Potter Has Some Publishing Glitches

by Anne Wayman on July 23rd, 2007

I was tickled to read that even the newest and supposedly the last in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, suffered a few publishing glitches.

Don’t get me wrong – the launch was obviously hugely successful and is resulting in truly astounding numbers.

But buried way down in the article That 8.3 Million Copies Sold Was Just the Beginning at Publisher’s Weekly is a paragraph that among the millions were a few books that had misprinted or duplicate pages. Apparently the books skip from page 642 to page 707 to 730 then go back to page 675 to the end, the article says.

This tickles me only because I know from experience it’s impossible to get everything right. The initial printing of my first ghostwriting project misspelled the author’s name!

There’s something humanizing about this sort of news, at least for me. In fact, I’ve come to believe when it comes to writing and publishing (and everything else actually) perfection is an impossible goal. It’s worth working toward, but not at the expense of getting the book done.

Write well and often,

Two newsletters:
Abundant Freelance Writing - a resource for freelance writers including 3x a week job postings.
Writing With Vision - for those who want to get a book written.

Share This

Related Stories

• Harry Potter, My Granddaughter and Me
• Freelance Writers Need to Play
• Yes, J.K. Rowling Has A Literary Agent
• Scam Warning & Common Sense
• The Self-Publishing Manual

POSTED IN: Book Writing, Editing, Pubishing & Marketing, General Freelance Writing