A steganographic scheme proposed by van Dijk and Willems can alter a relatively small amount of bits to hide the secret compared to other schemes while reducing the distortion and improving the resistance against the steganalysis. However, one bit error in the embedding scheme by van Dijk and Willems may result in multibit error when extracting the hidden data. This problem is called as error spreading. It is observed that only some single-bit errors suffer from error spreading. In this paper, we propose a new steganographic solution which takes advantage of unequal error protection codes and allows for the different protection of different secret bits. Thus the proposed solution can effectively protect bits which could suffer from error spreading. In addition, it saves parity bits, thus greatly reducing the amount of bit alterations compared to the relevant previous schemes. Experimentation using various test images indicates that the proposed solution achieves the tradeoff between the performance and the protection of the embedded secret.