Edits complete

Well, I've uploaded the edited Kindle copy of the book. Now I just need to get the edits into the hard copy. This should be interesting . . . Thanks for your patience everyone!

Lessons learned the hard way

So I'm in the middle of trying to recruit reviewers for a blog tour, and in one e-mail I sent I included a little defense of myself as a self-published author because I was requesting a review from a group who rarely do self-published books. I feel like I've put enough time, care, and effort into my book for it to have been published the traditional way had I chosen to go that route; if I didn't, I would never have published it at all. I wrote and rewrote and had it edited by multiple people and fixed it again. I had as much of it as I could read through in writing groups and bounced ideas off of other authors and made adjustments based off of their input. I took writing classes and used the skills I learned. I put a lot of work into this book, and I told them that while I understood if they refused on the grounds that it was self-published, but I'd appreciate it if they gave it a chance and, if they refused, refused based off lack of time or interest and not publishing methods. (I hope I didn't come across as snotty.) Well, shortly after I'd sent the e-mail, my mother-in-law came' in and pointed out to me what has to be one of the most glaring errors in publishing history. Three words, "Dismiss the insult," randomly placed at the end of a paragraph with no apparent connection to anything. I must have created that error somehow after my editors had gone through the book, because there's no way they could have missed something like that. So now it's confession time.

I hate to read my own writing. I should have read through the thing one last time to check for things like that (and anything small that the editors could have easily missed), one last time before publishing the book. I had ample opportunity to do so, but I'd read my silly story too many times and really, really didn't want to read it again, so I trusted that anything serious had been caught and that I hadn't created any other problems like that while editing and formatting and published the book without a last read-through. Well, I've learned my lesson. Never, ever, ever, ever again. I do not want to give a bad name to self-publishers, and I hope I haven't already destroyed my own reputation before I've had a chance to really build it.

Okay, so maybe that's a bit dramatic, but that's how I feel right now. You don't usually see mistakes like that in books published through any respectable corporation. The odd wrong or misspelled word here and there, maybe, from time to time. After all, even their employees are only human. But not a random phrase like that . . . sigh. So I've taken my book off the market for now to fix it and give it a good read-through to check for any more errors. Hopefully it will be up again in the next few days. And eventually I will look back on this and laugh. For now though, I think I want to go curl up into a ball with chocolate.