This was embarrassing. I looked through the paperback edition of Chronicles of Marsh when it arrived in late October last year, and didn’t spot any problems. Imagine my shock and horror when I read through it before finalising Princelings Revolution and found several chapters with many of the paragraphs misformatted.
Technical difficulty – seeing the editing box
It was all down to the need to format the paragraphs individually, in my paperback publishing system. If you want indented starts or a line between paragraphs you do it manually. Tedious but simple. Blurb has made many improvements to its BookWright interface over the years, but the font on screen is around 8pt, and you can’t enlarge the box. I’ve tried, including using the accessibility features.
Generally speaking, I can scroll down a mass of text and see where a paragraph ends. Then tab, and scroll on to the next one. I was either tired, or suffering visibility problems, because I missed a lot of them – mostly when the paragraph ended at the end of a line. Equally disturbing were the tabs in the middle of paragraphs. I’d obviously thought the end of a sentence was the end of a paragraph.
These are understandable mistakes. What I can’t understand is first, why I didn’t see this when going through the online proofing tool, and second, why I didn’t see it when I got the paperback in my hand.
Excuses
The only excuse I can offer is the stress of moving. I uploaded Chronicles on 2nd November. We were trying to complete the legal stuff (I desperately wanted it completed by 25th in order to qualify to vote in my new constituency). Eventually we completed on 13th December. First one hitch with my buyers, who were allowing me three months free tenancy, and then with my solicitors simply seeming slow. I think once Chronicles was out in all formats, I got on with the moving stuff.
But failing to check is no excuse. Unfortunately, Blurb will not adjust the book without issuing a new ISBN, so I’ve been through the pages on here changing the ISBN for ordering. The old version is now not available, but Amazon will probably continue to list it forever – but I did change the book information to say it was withdrawn, so I hope that helps.
Buy the paperback!
The Ingram distribution system is now rolling out the new version (ed 1.1) to all bookstores. It will probably show at Amazon, B&N, etc in a few days although up to six weeks is possible. You can order it by its new ISBN 9781715725402 at your favourite store. Sorry about that.
If you’ve already bought the paperback, it’s readable. But if you want to exchange it, let me know, including an example of an obvious formatting mistake (page number), and I’ll send you the new version via Book Depository.
