Last week I shared some inside baseball (and by baseball I mean book publishing) details about editing and copyediting and galleys and the wonderful world of trying to get a book to DONE. And I promised I’d tell you the story of my favorite typo, which is really the story of my favorite person who detected and then notified me of a typo. It’s also the story of why I now read every manuscript out loud, slowly, word by goddamn word, before I turn it in. But before I tell you that story, here are Some Things:

• I get to return to the City Arts + Lectures stage to interview the incredible Tourmaline on Wednesday, Dec 10. Tickets are still available! We’ll be discussing Tourmaline’s beautiful and fascinating biography of Marsha P. Johnson.

• I’m starting to book events for the launch of Where the Girls Were, and will soon be sharing Bay Area events for February and March, and hopefully select non-Bay Area cities as well. Stay tuned!

• Also in the works: I’ll be teaching some Creative Writing workshops (for grown-ups!) in 2026. In person in the Bay Area, online, and one in Santa Fe in May! Details soon but if you’ve ever thought “I feel like it would be fun to take a class with Kate!?” the answer is “yes, it would be fun!” and I’ll share details soon!

• Speaking of Where the Girls Were, you can preorder it now! As every author will tell you over and over and over, preorders are a big deal and really help (they are the primary indicator that a book “has buzz” and more preorders = more enthusiasm and attention from PR + marketing and also preorders are a major factor when it comes to making the NYT bestseller list which is obviously not the only indictor of a book’s success but it’s still pretty damn great).

• Another way to help your friend the author Kate Schatz is if you’re on Goodreads (if and only if—please don’t go sign up just to do this!) you can find WTGW and mark it Want-To-Read. In fact, there’s a giveaway on Goodreads for the book right now! Go win a copy! (Ok maybe it’s worth signing up just for that!)

• Finally: this week I got to see two of my absolute most beloved favorite musicians live. If you can catch Neko Case and/or Patti Smith on their current tours, PLEASE DO. I’ve seen them both many many times over the years, and they’ve never sounded better. Both women are unreal in their power, their voices, and their commitment to making urgent, transcendent, real-ass art.

And now, the Great Typo Story, aka T is for TYPO!

In 2015, I published a radical feminist children’s book called Rad American Women A-Z, along with my collaborator, the artist Miriam Klein Stahl. It was the first (and only!) children’s book ever published by San Francisco’s legendary publisher City Lights (and, ok, here’s a fun fact: it became their bestselling title ever, surpassing what now? Yup, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.)

The book went through multiple rounds of copyediting, of course, and because it’s a children’s book with a much lower word count than a whole-ass novel, that process wasn’t quite as laborious. But it was still thorough AF! We’re talking MANY rounds of copyediting/proofing/etc.

When the book came out it was a near-instant NYT bestseller. It had gone viral in the way that feminist children’s books could go viral in 2015 (hint: it involved Facebook and a Yahoo! news story. How quaint!). It quickly went into urgent reprints, as the initial print run was 5,000 copies (sizable for a small publisher like City Lights, and a legit gamble on a lefty children’s book that starts off with a story about Angela Davis).

Rad American Women A-Z was reprinted numerous times and continued to sell really well—it was a whole wild whirlwind (another story for a future Substack dispatch perhaps!), and over the next several years I visited hundreds of schools, libraries, festivals, after-school programs, etc etc, across the country (once I did a reading at an Athleta store at a mall?! It was terrible, actually). I shared the book’s stories about badass, inspiring women to an international school in Queens; to an auditorium of 500 high schoolers in Miami as an opener for Rep. John Lewis!!!; to a classroom of gifted kindergartners in Silicon Valley; to skeptical middle schoolers in Palm Desert; to an elderly audience at a library that included a very audible snore-er. I read on the radio, onstage, on podcasts, and on TV.

I read about Angela Davis, Billie Jean King, Carol Burnett, Dolores Huerta, Ella Baker, Flo Jo, the Grimke Sisters…ah, the Grimke sisters. How many times did I read that story and NOT notice the typo?!

By December 2018, we had published two more books in the series (Rad Women Worldwide and Rad Girls Can), and had sold upwards of 250,000 copies. I had been out on the road promoting both, but was still regularly reading from Rad American Women. Still sharing the story of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two 18th century sisters who left their wealthy family’s South Carolina plantation to become abolitionists and suffrage leaders. I knew the story so well, I could almost recite it from memory.

And then this arrived in my inbox, sent to me and my editor:

OMG BEATRICE! TEN YEAR OLD BEATRICE! TEN YEAR OLD BEATRICE READING OUT LOUD TO HER PARENTS AND NOTICING A TYPO AND THINKING “I SHOULD DEFINITELY TRACK DOWN THE EMAIL FOR THE AUTHOR AND HER EDITOR AND WRITE THEM AN EMAIL TO LET THEM KNOW.”

Who does that?!?!

BEATRICE, that’s who.

Three years of readers. Hundreds of thousands of copies sold. Read by who knows how many parents and librarians and teachers and aunties and kids and reviewers and ME and none of us noticed?!

Or if they did, no one thought to let me know?!

We obviously replied immediately to Beatrice, and praised her sharp eyes and close reading skills. We promised to send her a new book once the typo was corrected, and guess what?! That happened! A new print run had already been schedule, so we were able to fix the typo, and remove the extra “the.” Extraneous article, gone! All thanks to this rad kid who wanted our book “to be as awesome as possible.”

So! If you’re someone who owns a copy of Rad American Women A-Z, open it up the G is for GRIMKE page, and go to the first sentence of the last paragraph. If it reads “In 1838, Angelina became the first woman to speak in front of a legislative body…” you’re looking at a corrected A.B. (After Beatrice) edition, printed in 2019 or after. If it reads “In 1838, Angelina became the the first woman to speak in front of a legislative body…” then you have a pre-2019 B.B. copy, and it’s worth a ton of money on eBay. JUST KIDDING. There is no monetary value to this story. Just a really great example of what to do when you find a typo (let the editor know! But be really sweet about it!) and also a friendly reminder that you can read a page of your own writing like 1,000 times and still not notice a glaring typo that is visible only to the eyes of a precious, eagle-eyed 10-year-old from Chantilly, Virginia.

Thanks again, Beatrice! PLEASE GO INTO PUBLISHING!

And now, I would like to take this opportunity to correct YET ANOTHER typo! It has come to my attention (because of last week’s dispatch, and a subsequent text from a friend!) that in the Acknowledgements* page of Rad Girls Can I included the name of a good friend who’s also a children’s librarian who was very helpful to me and my family during the writing of the book and after all these years she has finally let me know that I SPELLED HER LAST NAME WRONG!!!

I hope it’s clear by now that I’m very open to knowing about my typos! So if you’ve spotted any in my work and have been too shy to tell me, speak up my eagle-eyed wonders! I can handle it!

XO

Kate

p.s. Speaking of Rad American Woman A-Z *and* Neko Case, here’s a bonus photo of the golden age of Rad American Woman A-Z when I got to go backstage at a show (one of the first times I saw her live I think!) to give her a book for her niece and she was so sweet and very excited about C is for CAROL