Making Mistakes and Fixing Them

The thing I like about self-publishing is that if I find a mistake after I publish a book, I can fix it. Of course it would be swell if I could find them before I publish, but sometimes, the story needs a little overhaul. Yeah, sure it's a pain, I hate re-uploading, because it's more than just that one manuscript that needs to be fixed. Or rather should I say "built".

If you're not a writer, you might think it's just a matter of sitting at the computer and writing a book, doing some magic and "poof", they're for sale on Amazon. But it's not. Once you write the first draft, then it's a matter of revisions and rewrites. So you end  up writing about 10 drafts before you get a decent manuscript. Then it's off to the critique partners for more rewrites and revisions.

The original document, after the problems have been taken care of, usually needs to be what I called "flipped", meaning opening a new document and flipping the corrected version into it. Then I have to make sure all my italics are the same and the green and red squiggly lines are gone. (The less KB   you have on a ms. the better off you are.)

After that, I upload to the mobi.creator to get on Kindle. Then that prc.doc, gets put into Calibre for conversion to epub for the Nook. Once all that's done, then I go back to the original version and doctor that up for Smashwords -they need special wording on the title page. (I know, you must be asking, now that Kindle, and Smashwords now accept epub, you only have to write one document.) Yes, but I would still have to do conversions because of the wording you have to do on Smashword.

Well, I've just fixed all four of my novellas. Several people complained about a particular aspect of my writing, and for the last couple of months I've chosen to ignore it because, well because I've been really busy writing other stuff. But now that Masquerade is done, I decided to take the bull by the horns and go in and fix all the errors.

Four novellas = 16 different manuscripts + covers. Hopefully now, I won't have to do it again. However, I do also have to tackle my novels and that's going to take awhile. It's not just a simple thing of find and replace. I'm sure if I had listened to my instincts in the first place instead of second guessing myself while I wrote the first words of the first book, I wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

But live and learn as they say.

Now they're done and I'm hoping never to have to look at them again. Don't get me wrong, I love my stories, but after reading and rereading them 10,000 times, I just don't want to see them again.

So, I hope you like the "new improved" versions. Maybe with the next book, I'll have made it easier on myself and written it right the first time.