Taylor Swift is one of the most famous individuals on the planet, and she has only seen her fame soar even further after she began dating Kansas City Chiefs superstar tight end Travis Kelce earlier this year. But even though she is resoundingly popular around the world, she is not immune to criticism.
Last month, Taylor Swift released her long-awaited book celebrating her record-breaking Eras Tour. However, the self-published $40 book was marred by numerous errors, leading to significant disappointment among fans.
The book, which was sold exclusively at Target stores across the U.S., officially launched on Black Friday. While there was obviously a lot of excitement surrounding the release – as is the case with most of her merchandise – fans quickly took to social media to voice their frustrations with the final product.
According to the Daily Mail, fans spotted several glaring mistakes in the book.
For example, the concert date index page omitted a Toronto tour date, and some sketches of Taylor’s concert outfits were either inaccurately colored or depicted costumes she never wore on stage. The book also promised “never-before-seen performance photos from every era,” but many of these “photos” turned out to be freeze-frames from the “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” film.
Fans also reported several grammatical errors, misspelled words, and various other typos in the book, including one instance where a fan discovered their book was printed upside down. Since the books were sealed in plastic wrap to prevent previewing the product before purchase, these flaws only became apparent after buyers opened the books.
In a now-viral TikTok, a fan named Emma shared an especially critical review, voicing her disappointment with the product.
“When I got home and started flicking through the book, I was actually blown away by the amount of grammatical mistakes, so many in fact that I am seriously questioning if this book was even edited,” Emma said in her video. “If there are certain spelling mistakes that are really distracting, it really takes me out of the reading experience, and I really, really felt that with this book.”
“If you are paying $40 for a book, wouldn’t you expect it to not have this many errors? Wouldn’t you expect the pictures to not be cut off? Wouldn’t you expect the pictures to be crisp and clean and not blurry?” she continued. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if they were on a deadline or what. The grammatical problems that I have found should have been fixed right away.”
All of these issues are tied to Swift herself, as the book was published through her own publishing company, Taylor Swift Publishing.
Needless to say, this is a pretty horrible look for Taylor and the blatant errors have generated a lot of backlash.
“As long as she makes money I don’t think she cares,” one person commented on Reddit.
“Grammatical errors? There’s barely any text in the book… Not going to say it was ‘false advertising’ when my source was social media hype, but everyone was making it sound like there was going to be all this brand new trivia, and it’s just a paragraph from Taylor about each Era next to a bunch of photos everyone has seen before,” another fan remarked.
“I have never heard one good thing about quality Taylor merch,” another person said.
“It’s a cash grab, folks!” someone else chimed in.
“This is why you always have to proofread your material before releasing it. Otherwise, it comes off as a first draft, and/or just lazy,” another person pointed out.
“This actually makes me sad for them. They put her on this pedestal and she doesn’t even care enough to put a little effort into her merch,” another wrote.
Clearly, people are not happy with the pop superstar.
