EBooks Formatting Errors Chapter 365

As I’ve whined elsewhere on this site, Vixen in Velvet --aka Leonie's book--is still in progress. Can I explain why it’s taken two years instead of one and had to be rewritten seven hundred times?  Maybe I could, but this would take a very long time and a great many words better used in completing the book rather than explaining its tortoise pace to the finish line.

And this eternity of writing one book also explains why I’m still behindhand in correcting errors in eBooks.

However, as reported previously (here and here), Knaves’ Wager, The Lion’s Daughter, and Captives of the Night have been cleaned up.  Kindle and Nook readers have received notice of updates.

However I learned not long ago, to my consternation, that readers of iBooks and some other formats never received these notices. And so I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and investigated.

It turns out that the iBookStore sends out update notifications only if the book is made with the iBooks program.  We didn’t use that program.  But that doesn’t mean readers can’t get a clean version of the book for free.  It only means they don’t receive notice about updates.

If you’re an iBook reader looking for the updates of the aforementioned books, you simply re-download the book from your purchased books or the iBookstore on your iPad.

As noted above, it’ll be a while before any more of these early books get updated.  Completing Vixen in Velvet is my top priority.  The good news is, I’m working on the last quarter of the book.

Knaves' Wager is back in print

A number of readers have written to let me know they vastly prefer an actual printed book in their hands—and ask wistfully whether my out-of-print books will ever be in print again.

Loyal readers, I’m delighted to report that the what seemed to be hopeless isn’t, and the process has begun.  Knaves’ Wager, the fifth of my traditional Regencies, is now available in print.

This is a print-on-demand paperback.

What does this mean?   In a nutshell (if you don’t feel like reading the Wikipedia entry linked above), a POD is printed after the publisher/printer gets the order, not en masse by the thousands, as is the case with appropriately-named mass market paperbacks.

A couple of notes re POD.  Different, slightly larger size than mass market paperbacks.  Not as readily available in bookstores, though easily purchased online.  And slightly higher priced than mass market, because one-at-a-time costs more than mass production.

Since I’ve finally finished proofreading my first two historical romances, The Lion’s Daughter and Captives of the Night, I’m crossing my fingers that by now those of you who purchased the eBooks have received notice of the corrected versions being available.  And I’m looking forward to announcing their return to print as well, before too long.

Remaining proofreading, as indicated in my June post, will have to wait until I finish Vixen in Velvet.

Job #483: Proofreader

I got quite a few complaints about errors in some of the digital versions of my earlier books, as mentioned previously.  This was something we tried to put in the hands of professional proofreaders.  That didn't work.  It seems you really need to be the author (and in possession of a good memory as well as a clean hard copy* of the original manuscript) to catch all the errors and not fix things that weren't wrong.

So I'm doing it myself.  And this takes forever.  And because it takes forever I can't do it all at once, or the new book I'm supposed to be writing will never get finished.  I proofread the eBooks in the evenings, after my writing hours.

Not long ago, I did complete the review of Knaves’ Wager.  Eagle-eyed readers will notice that spelling has been Americanized (the attempt at British spelling was a policy of my first, hardcover, publisher), some less-than-felicitous word choices have been corrected, and the scene breaks have been returned.  The OCR errors have all, I trust, been fixed.  Since nobody's perfect, readers may still find an error here and there, but only the normal amount.

What they will not find is a new version of the book.  Even if I had the inclination to go back and rewrite a book I wrote several hundred years ago, I don't have time.  I was proud of what I wrote then; it's impossible to write the same kind of book now that I wrote at a different stage of my life; and I think most readers would rather have the original story.

*Had it been possible to transfer the originals to my hard drive, we wouldn't have had this problem in the first place.