Earlier this week, I walked into the office to be confronted by a bit of a disaster. There was a stinking error in one of the blurbs for our Command books. In the blurb for Command 11 Hannibal to be exact. We had dozens of emails pouring in from fans, customers - and contributors telling us about the error - and a thread quickly appeared on TMP discussing it.
What was the mistake? Well we had decided to ignore the Second and Third Punic wars, awarding victory to the Romans after the first war - by declaring that after the First Punic War the Romans had reduced the captial city of the Carthaginian Empire to a heap of ashes. Which is of course complete tosh.
But I have an admission to make. This was a mistake made by the Marketing Team - not by any of our editors - or authors. You see, about seven months before a book comes out (quite often even before the book is finished) the marketing team sit down to create a blurb that we can use in our catalogues, and send out to online retailers like Amazon, who demand book information months and months before books are published. These blurbs are then always checked by the editors responsible for the book - and this error was immediately picked up and passed back to the Marketing team.
We forgot about it.
And forgot to correct the blurb.
Leaving us with a copious amount of egg on our collective faces.
Now, we were tempted to take the person responsible round to the back of the offices for them to be quietly put out of their misery. But we decided that such a quick escape was little more than cowardice. So we decided to instead stick him in detention for the rest of the week - where he is writing some lines for us. 500 of them to be precise. Going something along the lines of:
"Carthage was not burnt to the ground after the first Punic War you dolt - what would have been the point of the Second and Third wars if that had been the case?"
He hasn't got that far with the lines yet - he is up to about 100 odd - as you can see in the pic below. Still, although the culprit may not be that clued up on his Cathaginian history, if we do ever decide to dip our toes into the world of Alternate History, we know that we have a ready made author on hand. He has had enough practice!
In all seriousness though - we need to apologize to the editors for dropping the ball on this one - and to the author Nic Fields and to thank all the people who did pick up on our mistake. If you do ever spot another glaring error in our blurbs drop us a line at marketing@ospreypublishing.com. That way we can correct it without the editors even noticing...they have enough on their hands already!
Being a marketing bod myself, I still maintain that this was a wildly successful viral campaign to get people talking about the book. But then I would. After all, I'm a marketing bod...
If you hurry you might be able to see the error in all its glory - but we are currently updating the site, so it won't be up for long.