Learning As I Go

I never claimed to know what the hell I was doing when it came to assembling and publishing my own book but in the end I think I did OK with my first stab. I have received personal feedback that has been overwhelmingly positive but the first two reviews on Amazon were atrocious. They were both one star reviews and were confusing as hell. The first was from a guy who did not finish the first chapter, decided he was bored, and then decided that was enough to give a one star review. I have a serious problem with that but he did it and I moved on. The second was from a woman who claimed she had finished it and hated every second of it. The language she used and the things that she decided to bitch about did not lend themselves to a review it read more like the angry tirade of a child who enjoys trying to make people kill themselves. I really just need to ask this wonderful human being one question.

Where is your book that I can read and review?

Well?

I am fucking waiting?

That’s what I thought, moving on.

But that is not to say that serious critiques (I hate the word criticism) are not extremely helpful. A good friend of mine, who is also a writer I respect a lot, gave me some really good notes on the book and I have taken them to heart. There grammatical and structural things in the book that I will not tackling in any near future updates but there are quite a few layout problems that needed to be addressed.

But first the short back story.

My original editor flaked out on me less than three weeks before the release date of the book. I posted a plea and a wonderful woman (Marla) responded and powered through the book doing an amazing editing job. Seriously kids you should see the redline copy she sent me, she is a fantastic editor. But it is my job to proofread and layout the final copy.

I dropped the ball.

I did a rush skim, pasted the file into the Create Space template, and then gave one more quick skim. Then I uploaded the file, uploaded the converted Kindle Format file without even opening it, and called it good.

Like I said, I dropped the ball.

Tonight I finished a cleanup job on the files and re-uploaded them. It looks better and I can try to return my attention to other projects. So I am content with the new edition and think that others will be too. There are always going to be errors, I dare anyone to show me a book that does not have errors in it. Nothing is ever perfect and I am not going to lose sleep or think that my creation is “Pathetic and Unreadable” because there are some errors.

Life is too short.

But I do need to remember that critiques from trusted sources are necessary and useful. Without feedback it is infinitely harder to hone your craft, but there is a huge difference between critiquing and being an asshole.

That’s all.