With the release of my novel, it is time to share a secret: There are mistakes in the text. There are three purposeful mistakes. Will you find them? You'll have to order the book first.
Ok, now that you've made your purchase, and bought extras for friends, you may be curious about why an author would include mistakes, on purpose, in her book.
My book is told from the perspective of Penelope "Nell" Porter, who is sixteen. She is writing her story quickly and under a time crunch. At the novel's beginning, she states she may make some writing errors, which the reader should ignore. Some of my early readers thought this was a clever way to get out of editing my manuscript. This isn't the case. It's a way of managing my own annoyance. In reality, a person writing quickly is not going to have every thought realized, every word spelled perfectly or every comma in place. My book understands this. However, it also doesn't abuse it.
As stated above, I have three mistakes that were purposefully included in the book. If you find more than three, those are legitimate mistakes. It happens. In fact, it is almost impossible to have a perfect book. It is said that any novel-length, published manuscript will have about five errors despite months (sometimes years) of editing and proofing.
My personal example of this is my own novel. The protagonist has a brother named Pierce. She also encounters a character named Phil. At one point in the novel, I reversed their names. I didn't catch it. My numerous editors and proofreaders didn't catch it. None of the beta readers pointed it out. This book saw no less than 20 readers who all ignored a blatantly obvious mistake. It was only when I was reading through the final layout of the pages that I saw it. We were within a whisper of going to print and there it was, staring me in the face. There could be more that I didn't catch. There probably are.
That said, there are three purposeful mistakes I hope you do find. If you do, please share them with me. I'd love to hear your opinion on them and I'm dying to explain why I chose those specific errors, but I don't want to spoil anything at this point. So, for now, I wait.
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