Exciting Times

Well, the past week has been very exciting indeed. Starting with a nice-gosh I'm excited-type of excitement, progressing to a-good Lord what's going on-excitement, and culminating in a-I've never felt so stressed in my life-excitement.

It got my pulse going.

On Tuesday (that's my time, not your time [unless that's the same thing]) my latest novel went up for pre-order on Amazon. Gosh, I was excited. I received the email letting me know this was happening shortly after receiving my free copy courtesy of Kindle Press due to my nomination of my own book through the Kindle Scout program. (Yeah, that's where one of my votes came from.)

This publisher lark is certainly a new experience. Usually I know before my readers what's happening with my titles.

Reading through my book page on Amazon I noticed that my blurb had been completely rewritten. Oh well, whatever. Thanks for the heads up people.

On second read through I noticed that the newly written blurb had a number of instances where the text departed from what happened in the book. One quite significantly departed from a major theme in the book. On third read through I noticed that the newly written blurb had two instances where something at the start of the blurb contradicted something that appeared later in the blurb. And all this in three compact paragraphs. Good Lord, I thought, what's going on?

After dispatching an email noting the five errors present in the new blurb I reached out for help from Facebook (where else) and was pointed in the direction of the Author Central page where I could happily override the details that Kindle Press had loaded up for the book.

Feeling rather like I was going behind Mummy and Daddy's back, I updated the blurb to the one I'd already released on my website and sent out a Twitter and Email blast to let my followers know my book was now available.

My job done for the moment I sat back to let the reviews roll in. The first one noted there were a number of typos that could be picked up by spell check in word.

Two editors and a proofreader and there had better not be!

Luckily, the reader provided a number of examples through to me. Excellent. And they were quite right. There were a lot of errors that could have been picked up spell check in word. In fact, if they'd been present in the manuscript I submitted I would've been ashamed.

However, they weren't. So I was horrified instead.

Two editors and a proofreader (not to mention me going over the manuscript at least a dozen times just looking for errors) and the final version went out to every reader who nominated me through the Kindle Scout program with errors introduced during the conversion process to turn a word document into an Amazon .azw ebook file.

I've never felt so stressed in my life**

All those lovely free copies are sent out to readers in the hopes of generating reviews for the book while it's on preorder so when it's released for sale potential readers can peruse the multitude of reviews in order to inform their reading choice.

A multitude of reviews that will say things like: it was fine apart from all the typos.

Now, three days after alerting Kindle Press to the problem, I'm sitting and waiting for a message to let me know that the file has been fixed and all those readers have been sent a bump letting them know they can download the alternative, error-free version. Also, to let me know that the version sent out to paying customers once the preorder period is up won't still contain them.

I'm also waiting for an error free copy to send to bloggers who may be interested in reviewing and hosting on their blogs.

Yep. This publisher lark is certainly a new experience.

(and if you'd like to preorder a probably-error-free copy CLICK HERE)

**obviously a lie