The Beautiful Ego Death of Having My Book Fact-Checked

Every nonfiction book should go through this vetting, and every author should have this experience.

I’m not used to feeling particularly vulnerable in my writing. Of course I care about what readers think, but I write about space, science, and—in my first book, The Possibility of Life (keep your eyes peeled for a preorder link, thank you)—the ways we imagine alien life. Very little of me is, at least obviously, on the line. But then, a few months ago, I bundled several years of research and writing into a few hopefully well-organized files and emailed them to a stranger. And then I sat and waited, and I felt more naked as a writer than I ever had before. I was about to be fact-checked.

Over my years of writing, I’ve gotten very used to the idea of needing an editor. I lean on editors, and am grateful for their input, because as much as I work to imagine a reader’s experience of my writing, it’s a lot easier when there’s an actual reader to tell me. But fact-checking my book felt different. I’ve been fact-checked once before, for an essay built on years of museum archives and my own observations. But that was one essay—a few months of work, one little slice of my heart. My book is the whole thing.

Few people who are not nonfiction writers know that books are not fact-checked as a matter of course. Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote about this flaw at the core of nonfiction publishing for Esquire in 2020. “Despite the common sense idea that books are the longer and more permanent version of magazine articles,” she wrote, “there is an informal division of church and state between the worlds of book publishing and magazine journalism. The latter is subjected to rigorous fact checking, while the former is not.”

I knew having a fact-checker find mistakes would be less painful than strangers doing so once the book was published. But it wasn’t only fear of censure (though that is very strong with me). I wanted my book to be a useful and factual addition to the conversations it would be a part of: astrobiology, cultural criticism, the ways science and fiction inform our experience of the world. And far too many books, un-fact-checked, introduce mistakes into the accepted knowledge of the world.

There are the high-profile scandals about errors in nonfiction, which luckily get caught: Naomi Wolf misinterpreting her research, Jared Diamond being called out in a New York Times book review for work “riddled with errors,” Malcolm Gladwell’s whole thing. But we also swim in a sea of incorrect facts that trace their origins to a writer’s mistakes. Tove Danovich encountered one such factoid while researching her book, Under the Henfluence: Inside the Fowl World of Chickens and the People Who Love Them (coming March 2023).

Danovich found the falsehood everywhere, from articles in Scientific American to “Five Facts You Didn’t Know About Chickens” memes: the claim that chickens can recognize a hundred other chickens by face. And it’s just not true. Danovich traced it back to a book that cites a paper from the journal Animal Behaviour about the gaze and behavior of chickens, but the paper says nothing of the sort.

“I was so mad about not finding it,” Danovich told me in an email, “that I actually emailed [the paper’s author] to make sure I wasn’t missing something (also I really wanted to use the fact in my book!).” It was finding that error that convinced Danovich to get her own book fact-checked, however she could.

The standard publishing process has no safeguards against these errors. An author says that’s what a study says? A claim has a footnote? Good enough. In Eisenberg’s article for Esquire, one publisher’s spokesperson told her, “The responsibility for the accuracy of the text does rest on the author; we do rely on their expertise or research for accuracy.” Funny how the responsibility for grammatical correctness is something publishers are willing to share. They make sure books are copyedited, they are proofread, they get a “legal read” to spot any changes that should be made to avoid threat of litigation. But they are not checked for correctness. Authors are assumed to be not only benevolent but also infallible. I can tell you, we are not.

So when books are fact-checked, it’s usually at the author’s expense. (At least one major imprint, Bold Type Books, does cover fact-checking as part of the publishing process. Chloe Angyal, author of Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself, told me, “It is the only reason I slept through the night in the months before my book came out.”) Some authors set aside a chunk of their advance or use savings. There are arts and creative grants that can help, but that’s never a guarantee.

Authors are assumed to be not only benevolent but also infallible. I can tell you, we are not.

Other authors stretch their budgets by only hiring a professional fact-checker for the most crucial parts. Danovich’s book is divided into three sections, one of which is almost entirely memoir. She said, “I decided to get a third of the book fact-checked to cover the sections that I felt had the biggest possibility of my missing or misunderstanding something.” The rest she fact-checked herself, using The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking. “I caught a couple embarrassing mistakes like changing a million to a billion in one place,” Danovich said. “I can only hope there isn’t anything else I missed on my own.”

Personally, I don’t have an academic background in the subjects I write about, save one undergrad-level astronomy class I took while I was getting my MFA. I’d spent years doing the best research I could, and I felt confident in the conclusions I’d drawn. But also, who knew what chickens-recognizing-a-hundred-faces lurked in my manuscript?

I was lucky to receive a grant from the Sloan Foundation that, in part, funded my fact-checking. It also provided for the payment of an expert science reader—and actually, there was the first ego blow, before even a word of my manuscript had been vetted by anyone: The grant administrators at the Sloan Foundation agreed to fund my proposal only with the provision that I would add to my budget a science reader’s fee. It seemed like a vote of confidence in my project but a skeptical squint at my ability to pull it off. Fair enough; I’m more an essayist than a journalist. I’d still happily take the money and get to work.

I ended up hiring six science readers, splitting chapters and sections up by discipline. I asked them for a gut-check, to flag things that were obviously wrong or that misrepresented consensus in the field. Having multiple readers was a secret blessing because it meant I ended up with multiple kinds of feedback. The evolutionary biologist who read my chapter on evolution offered a few additions and corrections but also offered the enthusiasm of a teacher excited to see his student get things right: “Yes!” “Exactly!” My astronomer reader got the chapters on the topic I know the most about—so of course that’s where the most mistakes were, from jumbled terminology to his quibbles with the extent of poetic license I tended to take. Could a star be said to burn when stellar fusion isn’t combustion? I saw his point and had to make my own decision, with full knowledge of factual shadiness, to keep the turn of phrase.

Fact-checking literary work is especially tricky in that realm. It’s the fact-checker’s job to be rigorous; the writer then decides if they still want to stray. Eva Holland, author of Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, told me that having magazine stories fact-checked has made her sometimes a more cautious writer. “Like, I write safer,” Holland told me, “rather than striving for an analogy or a description that I worry I might not be able to justify perfectly to the fact-checker,” even though she knows the intention isn’t to “nitpick our literary flourishes.” Luckily, she said, when it came time for book fact-checking, “all of that fell away . . . Instead, it just felt like a safety net.”

Before I could feel the safety net, what I felt was surveillance. My science readers’ feedback made me feel like I’d been holding forth confidently at a cocktail party only to have the quiet person in the corner adjust their glasses and, with a gentle “actually,” dismantle my fragile expertise. I’d done a couple of years of research in reading and interviews, across a probably too-wide range of subjects; these experts had years and years of education and research. How dare I? But somewhere between those instances of “Yes, exactly,” and my decision to still say that stars burn, I started to find my own place. Not an expert but an adept, with plenty of my own authority, somewhere in the alchemy of science and words.

But my humbling was far from complete at that stage. Once all my experts’ notes had been incorporated into the manuscript, it was time for the fact-checker, for a read against not just personal knowledge but all the research I’d used—and all I’d possibly missed.

I’d found Rachel Garner, my fact-checker, with a post in a science writers’ Facebook group. I spoke with a few other fact-checkers, but what struck me about Rachel was that she was more intensely type A than I am. My type A–ness is something I can turn off like a switch. When I travel with friends, I am the planner and prepper—unless I am traveling with someone who is more of a planner and prepper. Then I lose all critical-thinking ability and follow like a duckling. It’s honestly a relief. And with Rachel, I could tell, I would be flipping that switch off.

Or really, I would be safe despite the fact that for most of my writing process, my type A switch had been off. The only way I’d been able to get words onto paper was by prompting myself to write shitty first drafts. Word vomit, words on the page, do it badly and then make it better. But that close-your-eyes-and-leap drafting style doesn’t save room for careful sourcing rigor. I’d done my best to keep an eye on sources, but I worried that early intentional sloppiness had left its mark. (If I’d expected to have to fact-check myself, I’m sure I’d have done it differently, but then also the freedom of that early drafting would’ve been lost.) I had a massive, overstuffed Scrivener project holding every note, draft, ebook export, pdf, transcript, and research item from the last three years. I tidied it up the best I could and hoped it would be enough.

I started to find my own place . . . with plenty of my own authority, somewhere in the alchemy of science and words.

From my point of view, I sent Rachel annotated chapters and the Scrivener file of research, and then every few days she’d email me with questions about a chapter. The next day, the gloriously color-coded product would come in, and I could skim past pages of green-highlighted correctness, pausing just to fix the red highlights for errors and to deliberate over questionable content in purple. I told you she was wonderfully type A.

The errors that Rachel found ran the gamut: I got dates and book titles wrong, mistyping “The” for “A” and deciding a book that came out in 2000 had come out in 1992 for no reason at all. I misrepresented grammar in American Sign Language and fell for some game-of-telephone incorrect information that had been making the rounds through blog posts and articles for years. Rachel dug down and found the original, correct source.

She also—I will never stop thanking the stars for this—caught a deeper, subtler, bigger issue: that my sourcing for one section had been problematically narrow, and the experts I’d found represented a less representative camp than I’d realized. Rachel happened to be well versed in this field. She happened to know two experts I should talk to, happened to be able to make the introductions.

Rachel wrote me, “I know everything is pretty set at this point—and I don’t want to drop something major on your head at this point? I’ve been debating if it was even appropriate to send this email for a couple days.”

I couldn’t stop telling her how glad I was that she did. I wanted the book to be finished. I wanted it to be correct. But most importantly, I wanted it to be complete. I mean, no single book can cover the whole of creation and our understanding of its science and possibilities in six chapters. But this got me a little bit closer, a precious step.

Rachel was one of the first readers of my manuscript, after my editor, agent, and a few trusted friends. It was a step outside the bubble, for my words and ideas. Or maybe the bubble just got bigger—like those other early readers, she was a collaborator too. As Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (coming this December) put it to me, “Writing a book can be a really lonely process, and it was unexpectedly so heartwarming to have another invested reader at that last, final stage when you’re like, Ahh, what if I’ve written the world’s most annoying book!” By the end of the process, my book was better, my book was more accurate, but, blessedly, my grip on it loosened too.

I thought this essay would be about how fact-checking brought about a writer’s “ego death,” but then I learned that ego death isn’t what I thought it was at all. It’s not an ultimate humbling, one’s pride shattered by red lines and annotations. Instead, the term means something much more like transcendence, or the moment just before—the loss of personal identity and the dissolution of the boundaries of the I. That wasn’t the bringing-low of fact-checking at all.

Or . . . or was it? Once I inured myself to the stings of the thousand cuts of my errors, fact-checking became a kind of beautiful process. For the first time, I wasn’t solely responsible for the correctness of my work. I could trust-fall into the knowledge of my science readers and fact-checker and let them catch me, let them catch my mistakes and carelessnessses and misunderstandings as they offered me their own knowledge and sense of the world. The book was still mine, the work was still mine—and any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone—but the tightrope I was walking suddenly had a net.

Or maybe the image isn’t tightrope, but trapeze: the tight grip, the tense tricks, and then, at the end, the glorious fall, the net no longer a fail-safe but an embrace, catching you gently as you make your way back to the ground.