What can go wrong with a book?Here are 50 ways I messed up

Some sad rules of life in book publishing: 

(1) The bigger the book, the more errors it will have.
(2) Every time you try to correct an error, you risk creating more errors.
(3) If you strive for perfection, you will never complete the book.
(4) No book is perfect.
(5) Errors will be caught by readers, reviewers and nitpickers like me.

Carefully check your book for bloopers. (I've been guilty of all of them.)

1. Factual errors
2. Spelling errors
3. Grammar errors
4. Words or dates you meant to fill in "later" but didn't
5. Wrong typefaces, particularly when text is pasted-in from another source
6. Commas that should be periods -- and vice versa
7. Straight punctuation that should be curly "typographers' marks"
8. Curlies that curl in the wrong direction
9. Missing spaces between paragraphs or sections 
10. Flush-left justification that should be full justification
11. Bad justification in the last line of a page
12. Chopped-off descenders where you decreased line spacing (leading) or if the bottom of a text box is too close to the text
13. Wrong-size bullets
14. Text not aligned at tops of pages. (Professional page formatters try to align tops and bottoms.)
15. Rivers
16. Too-big word spacing
17. Normal letters that should be ligatures (more for large type than in body text).
18. Accidental spaces after bullets
19. Improper hyphenation
20. Misaligned numbers in a list
21. Roman text that should be italic, and vice versa
22. Normal text that should be boldface, and vice versa 
23. Ignoring highlighted warnings in MS Word.
24. Automatically accepting MS Word suggestions 
25. Gray text that should be black.
26. Insufficient space adjacent to images
27. Images or text boxes that floated over the margin.
28. Images or text boxes that 'slid' down and covered up footers
29. Missing periods at sentence ends 
30. Missing opening or closing quote marks.
31. Missing page numbers
32. Pages with numbers that should not show numbers (blind folios)
33. Periods that should be inside a closing parentheses -- or outside
34. Repeated words 
35. Wrong headers, missing headers, switched verso and recto headers
36. Subheads that are too close to the text above and too far from the text below
37. Too much space between lines in a multi-line title, chapter name or subhead
38. Inconsistencies such as 3pm on one page and 3 P.M. on another.
39. Inaccurate internal referrals such as "see comments on page 164" 
40. Words that shifted from the bottom of one page to the top of the next page
41. Chapter names and page numbers in the table of contents that don't reflect a change made in the actual chapter name or the first page of the chapter
42. Chapters missing from the TOC.
43. A topic not in the index because you added something after completing the index
44. Words that should have been deleted but were not
45. Names that were changed in some places but not in all places
46. Paragraphs that accidentally merged
47. Missing photo or illustration credits 
48. Credits for deleted photos or illustrations.
49. Photos or illustrations accidentally flipped left-to-right
50. Wrong ISBN or other information on the copyright page 

I'll discuss errors on book covers in the future.

(dog photo from www.Fotolia.com)