RickWrites..........Writing......It's What I do!

What's new today...

Well I can tell you it's been too long since I was last on here and  I intend to make up for it.
I can't believe it was Jun 2011 when I was last here, wow.

So much has happened since then, my book that was due out in Jul 2011 was delayed due to a post production error and has been released again as at Feb 2012, but I'm getting ahead of myself, lets go back to June 2011 (Would be great if we could).

In June 2011 a number of things went on, firstly I developed a chest infection which laid me up for awhile, then The edited manuscript of my book came back for review and we reviewed it. We accepted the minor changes that were highlighted as directed, and yes I had made some stupid errors, but that's why we have editors, other changes were in line with current printing standards etc. All was good and I returned it with my approval.

Jul 2011 my chest infection developed into a severe case of bronchial pneumonia or something and I was hospitalised for nearly 3 weeks, sick as.

Late August saw the arrival of the proof copies of my book, unbeknown to me at that time it was already on sale through the Barnes and Noble Website and Amazon also in hard and ebook form.
Everything was going well. We were making the final plans for our trip to Hawaii in Sep/Oct  and the 16 night cruise back to Sydney afterwards.  Anyway, I was excited obviously, my book was in print, I was over my pneumonia and generally things were looking good, until I started to read the proof copies.

First dozen or so pages, great. I was getting right into it, even though I'd written the book it was still exciting to actually hold it to read. Well from page 15 I found a few errors, to my horror those few got worse and it turned into a nightmare. There were words there that I didn't write or changed altogether. I had a line that stated 'The powerlines were brought down and left the mine in complete darkness' it now read 'incomplete darkness' as in not complete or not finished, it changed the whole meaning. Some pages were error free while others had up to 20 plus errors. It became a bit of a joke as a total of 235 errors were noted. The joke stopped when I started to recieve phone calls from as far away as Perth from friends stating they had my book and, by the way did you know it's full of mistakes? Now I was mortified.

Contact with the publisher was made pronto to sort this out. Initially they were not overly concerned and said they'd have to make some post-production corrections and could I send them a list of the changes needed. To cut a long story short, after they passed the blame on everyone alive, they fixed it and said if anyone that purchased a copy with errors could return it for replacement. Consequently all that took till January 2012 and it was re-released in Feb 2012 and is selling quite well really. I was contacted by a buyer in South Australia who had an error filled book, he said he enjoyed the book anyway but wanted to keep and said "It might be worth a fortune in the future". Well there you go.