It has to be the worst nightmare for an author, especially an author of non-fiction: to hear you got a major fact wrong…while live on the air. It recently happened to author Naomi Wolf, who wrote a book called Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love which will soon release. In the book, she cites several examples of people who were executed in Victorian England for being gay(or more accurately: for committing sodomy). The problem is that she misinterpreted one crucial expression, which she thought meant executed, but that actually meant they were pardoned. She was confronted with this crucial mistake while doing a live interview on radio.

Oops. 

No matter what you write about, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, no matter the genre, research os of crucial importance. If you look at my search history on Google (and I sometimes wonder of someone does…then shakes their head in wonder as they try to figure out what book I’m writing this time…), you’ll find curious search terms like common injuries after a car crash, the standard career path in a police corps, how electronic equipment would be affected by an EMP, or how long it would take to traverse the Black Hills on foot. I love being an author, did I mention that?

I spend a good amount of time doing research, especially for books like Ignite, which depend a little more on facts and what-if technical scenarios than my mpreg or contemporary books. But even for those, I want to make sure I get as much of the facts right as possible. And when necessary, I ask beta readers with specific knowledge. For Campy, for example, we had several beta readers from Texas to make sure we got Jackson (Campy’s Texan cowboy roommate) right, both in his background and in his speech.

Despite research, authors can get it wrong sometimes. Even traditionally published author like Naomi Wolf, who have a team of editors from the publishing company behind them. No matter how much you research something, you can still get it wrong.

Sometimes, authors get little things wrong, like forgetting certain guns have a safety. Or not. If you’ve never seen or held that type of gun, you wouldn’t know unless you did thorough research.

Medical issues are notorious, for instance getting details of injuries or diseases wrong. I messed up myself once when I labeled a diabetic insult as a hypo when it was a hyper. Luckily, one of my ARC readers ( a diabetic herself) caught it so I could fix it before it went live).

And I know readers get annoyed when you get geographic details wrong. If you describe a character in LA or Chicago getting from point A to point B in fifteen minutes, you’ve clearly never encountered traffic there. The Ballsy Boys series is set in LA and I knew from research how bad traffic was there, but aft6er visiting myself over the summer I could bring a whole new level of realism to those books, haha.

Other mistakes are easier to avoid. I once read a historical romance where one of the characters was a Dutch immigrant, described as still having a strong Dutch accent and making mistakes in the word order. The problem was that he made the wrong mistakes. Since I’m Dutch of origin, I easily picked up on this and it annoyed me. Having a native Dutch speaker as a proof reader would’ve prevented this.

But no matter how much you research, you can still get something wrong. Something small, like a tiny detail no one will notice…except that one reader who has experience with that little detail. Or something with major consequences, like in the case of Naomi Wolf. The point is that at the end of the day, authors are human. And humans make mistakes.

And man, do I feel bad for her…because there’s no way she knew and did this on purpose. How crushing that must be, to learn on air that the whole premise of your work is false.