Or rather, two winners. Congratulations to commenter Lyla and Twitter user @donserifa! Theirs names were picked at random from the set of all commenters on the original competition post, plus all those who replied to, retweeted, or marked as favourite the tweet announcing the contest. Their copies of the paperback edition of Shady Characters will be on their way very soon.
Here’s your chance to win a copy of the new, all-singing, all-dancing paperback edition of Shady Characters. I have two copies to give away, and I’ll happily post them to the two winners wherever they are in the world. To enter the competition, just do one of the following:
I had an enjoyable chat last night with Katy Steinmetz of Time.com about this yearly festival of punctuation (you can read her article on the subject here), but of arguably even greater importance is that the Shady Characters book is exactly one year old today! Happy birthday to it! (Or to me. How does that work, exactly?) Also, what better day than today, then, to reveal the cover of the forthcoming paperback edition?
This is a quick note to thank Tim Nau for his eagle-eyed contributions to the Shady Characters errata. As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment below if you come across an error in any edition or format of Shady Characters. I’d appreciate it very much, and I’d be very happy to acknowledge you in future editions!
Like many books, a few errors slipped through the net as I wrote Shady Characters and evaded even the practised gaze of Brendan Curry, my editor at W. W. Norton, and of Rachelle Mandik, our excellent copy-editor. Unlike some books, however, I’ve been lucky enough to have a cadre of eagle-eyed readers to pick up and help correct those mistakes. Without further ado, then, I give you the first instalment of Shady Characters’ errata. There will be more to come, I’m sure, as more editions are published (speaking of which, keep an eye out for the American paperback later this year!), but for now I must thank Mark Forsyth, Eric Johnson, Zoran Minderovic, Bill Pollack, Patrick Reagh, Jeff Shay, and Liz B. Veronis for helping point out and fix these errors.