Hello everyone! It’s me, Robbi! Sorry I haven’t posted in SOOOOOOO long, but the fact is, I’ve been busy. Lots of big projects (see here, here and here, among other things) that were all due at the same time. This means I’ve been kind of underwater with my swimming goggles on, only seeing straight ahead and not paying much attention to whatever else is going on. So – sorry for the neglect. In my defense, I am definitely not a natural-born multi-tasker, so the fact that I made it through all that without any major disasters is kind of a miracle.
“What? No major disasters?” you say. “Impossible.”
And you are correct.
Most of you have probably received your copy of the latest Bobbledy Book, Bobby and the Robots. It looks like this:
You may notice the book is called Bobby and the Robots. Yes, it’s a book about a boy named Bobby, and he has some robots.
So, when you open the book to the first page, you expect there to be some talk about Bobby, or some robots, or something along those lines.
Wait, what?! Who’s that?!
BOBBLY???
Yes. In the revising process, after our awesome editor Matt had carefully gone through the book checking for typos, grammar errors, and issues with the images, he suggested a rewrite of the first page, which Matthew rewrote and then I typed in, adding the “l” to Bobby. Though Matthew and I both checked that the revisions were actually made, I guess we weren’t paying close enough attention to how they were made. And thus, the book began by talking about “Bobbly.” I have no defense, save that all of the writing I’ve been doing about “Bobbledy Books” has taught my fingers that “l” just naturally comes after “Bobb”. Stupid fingers.
So, we didn’t discover this mistake. No, we sure didn’t.
But we got a call from the bindery. The guy who had been working on our book had thought perhaps his kids might like it, so opened it up to have a read, and noticed the typo. The books were already bound. Luckily, he had a solution. They could cut the binding off, reprint that first page, put the inside of of the book back together and wrap it in a new version of the cover and rebind it. It would cost us to reprint the bad page and new covers, but that was it. You might notice that your copy of Bobby and the Robots is a tiny fraction of an inch smaller than your copy of The Girl with Frogs in Her Ears.
So, it definitely set us back. But not nearly as much as it would have if the bindery guy hadn’t caught it. For that, I give SGM Bindery ten stars (out of four) and recommend that if any of you ever need binding done (unlikely, I’m sure, but what the heck) you do it with them. And while I’m giving out stars, I’m giving Matthew one star (out of four) for not catching the mistake, and I’m giving myself negative 30 stars (out of four) for introducing the mistake in the first place.