The ‘Errors Tour’: Fans Point Out Mistakes in Taylor Swift’s Official Tour Book
Emily M., a 26-year-old Taylor Swift fan in Washington state, woke up early on Saturday morning to join the line at her local Target with one goal: secure a copy of The Official Taylor Swift — The Eras Tour Book, released exclusively by the Tortured Poets Department pop star in a direct deal with the big-box wholesaler. With her $40 purchase, Emily expected a glossy coffee-table keepsake chock full of the biggest moments on tour. What she got were pages full of mistakes.
“People are lovingly dubbing this the errors tour book right now,” Emily noted in a TikTok that now has over 1 million views and hundreds of thousands of comments. “When I got home, I was actually blown away by the amount of grammatical mistakes I saw. I saw so many, in fact, that I am seriously questioning if this book was even edited.”
Emily isn’t the only one. Thousands of Swift fans have taken to social media with their discontent over the highly anticipated photo book. The complaints are varied. Some have posted photos of clunky grammar, factual mistakes on dates, and spelling errors in the lyrics of famous Swift songs.
Instead of “This is me trying,” Swift’s Folklore song is written, “this is me rying.” The full list of concerts is missing a Toronto date. A major complaint is also the photos, which fans have noted are pixelated, grainy, and low quality. A sparse few even received books with missing sections or inside pages flipped upside down. And photos that feature Swift and her line of dancers are cut so that Swift is almost hidden in the crease of the book’s pages. (Representatives for Swift did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.)
Mistakes in publishing happen. But as the book that was heralded as Swift’s rejection of traditional publishing houses by selling directly through Target, fans say the errors raise major concerns over whether the book really was a burden of love or a cash grab.
The Eras Tour photo book was marketed by Swift as way for fans to commemorate her record-breaking and world-capturing two-year tour — which became the highest-grossing concert tour ever in 2023. When Swift announced the book, she said its 256 pages would include commentary and over 500 photographs from the live show. “Here is the official retrospective of the most wondrous tour of my life, my beloved Eras Tour,” Swift shared in a statement. “Thank you to the fans who came to this show. You were what made the Eras Tour what it became.” Each era, she said, would receive its own spotlight in the book, accompanied by commentary written by Swift herself about the performance photos and behind-the-scenes images. But in typical Swift fashion, the pop superstar and music magnate didn’t release the book through any of the biggest publishing houses. Instead, she cut out the middleman entirely and released the book exclusively through Target.
Sophie Vershbow, a former publishing marketer and now journalist, tells Rolling Stone that Swift’s decision to release her book on her own sparked speculation among experts about whether it could lead to a change in celebrities’ relationships with publishing. She notes that in a similar fashion, Swift bypassed film studios and released her Eras Tour Concert Film directly with AMC Theatres.
“Book publishers rely on these very large celebrity deals to carry their balance sheet throughout the year. Most books do not turn a profit for a publisher, so they’re really taking a couple of big bets a year and hoping that those pay off,” she tells Rolling Stone. “Anytime someone does a thing like this, you have to think about how it might impact people down the line. When you’re talking about massive celebrities, logically, you could see someone with a massive team learning from how Taylor Swift did it.”
While Vershbow wrote in Esquire in November that a successful Eras Tour book launch could see celebrities attempting to follow in Swift’s footsteps, she also notes that many people underestimate the sheer work, time, and manpower it takes to get a book ready for release — something she speculates might have something to do with the glaring errors in Swift’s book.
“A lot goes into making a book. Printing, editing, there are so many parts of publishing that people don’t even think about. And now we’re seeing online that there are quality issues with the book,” Vershbow adds. “I went to the Eras Tour. Taylor Swift is not a sloppy person. And I have to imagine that there were good intentions to keep quality high on this, but that there’s a lot of things that her team didn’t consider, simply because they are not publishing experts.”
While fans debate whether to return the books or keep them as is, the mistakes haven’t affected sales. According to Business Insider, Target has named The Eras Tour Book as their highest-selling work of the year, meaning even when disappointed, Swifties are still a force to be reckoned with.
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