Every writer makes mistakes. Most are simple spelling or grammatical errors. Even with a top-notch editor, they're almost inevitable. But what I want to address are the mistakes that light up an author's inbox: "The weapon your antagonist carried wasn't even built for 50 more years." "That style of dress was out of date for a century." "The ships couldn't have been carrying coffee up the Thames—the British drank tea."
One of the most noted mistakes came from film, not a book. In the remarkable film Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox's character, Marty McFly, played a 1958 model guitar in a story set in 1955. Critics are still writing articles chastising the film for the mistake. Yet for me, it did nothing to change my opinion—the film was exceptional.
Recently, New York Times bestselling author Sara Poole published the book Poison. Set in 1492, she twice refers to Joan of Arc as Saint Joan of Arc. Her sainthood wasn't honored until 1920. Critics and readers chastised Poole for the mistake, some commenting that it almost made the book unreadable. It was the kind of error any author enthralled with a story and character could make. While I don't know Sara Poole, I'm sure she appreciated that it was "almost" unreadable. It sold well.
Sometimes history is tweaked simply because the real thing is too difficult to explain. The Boston Tea Party is a great example. Book after book tells us that the patriots who dumped thousands of dollars' worth of tea into Boston Harbor were protesting an increase in tea taxes imposed by the British Crown. In reality, the protesters were objecting to the Crown exempting the financially troubled British East India Company from tea taxes, which would have given them a monopoly and destroyed the successful tea trade carried on by American colonial companies. American business owners led the protest. Black market importers of Dutch tea helped organize the uprising. For the public, the price of tea would have been dramatically lower. But when you're trying to gin up a revolution—or write about it centuries later—that's hard to explain. I use this approach and am still waiting for a reader to object.
I write both thrillers and historical fiction, and I work hard to make my stories authentic. I get emails pointing out discrepancies. About half of the criticism is valid. Some, like those noted above, are just wrong. At the time readers were insisting the British only drank tea, over 50 tons of coffee was being imported into England annually. Others, like one writer who pointed out an error in the Havana setting in my book Tempest North, are right. The setting came from a personal observation during a visit to Cuba many years ago—but the actual wharf wasn't built until 50 years after the story's timeline.
While many authors chafe under this type of criticism, I love it. It forces me to dig even deeper than I already do when researching a story. But more importantly, it tells me that readers are seriously engaged with the story—even readers with knowledge of the location, event, or crisis that underpins it. So far, I haven't heard that a mistake made a book unreadable. More often I hear, "The story really hit me, and I wanted to know more, so I did a little research on my own." Knowing a story both entertains and informs is very satisfying.
Keep on criticizing.