Self-Publishing and My Products
Being a self-published author feels like I’ve opened a store where I sell my own products. I can refine, change, and add new products whenever I want. It’s wonderful.
I did all the word-work and formatting on The Neighbors myself, and I kept finding small mistakes after even the 20th edit. This is just a feature of doing things yourself, and I know plenty of traditionally published books have mistakes. The beauty is, I can update the book to fix these minor errors! And I will!
So far, two mistakes have been found in The Neighbors. On the Winter Solstice, and essentially every season, I’ll update the manuscript if another mistake is found. This means I’ll have a mistake-free product, at some point! And I’m happy to do that, happy to improve over time. Even when/if I pay for an editor, there will likely be mistakes caught by the public, and I hope I’ll always be able to correct them moving forward, traditionally published or not. I’m happy that Amazon allows me to update a manuscript when small changes need to be made.
I’ll tell you the flaws so far! Because why not. But SPOILER ALERT!! There is about to be a spoiler. Do not keep reading if you haven’t finished The Neighbors. Come back when you’re finished. Last chance. Spoiler incoming. Okay: At the end of the book when Archie’s fighting on Mt Jewel, he’s counting his bullets, and I somehow miscounted. It’s likely that I rewrote parts of the scene at one point and didn’t check the continuity of the prior paragraphs. So, he fires two bullets that shouldn’t be there! Thanks to Cristian and Kacy Moreno for pointing that out to me. Admittedly it was incredibly painful to read for myself once I was told! But it wasn’t a huge surprise, as I’d already had that experience multiple times in the editing process—reading through and thinking everything was great, then days later suddenly noticing that I put a period where there should be a comma somewhere. How did I miss that? I really don’t know. But these books are written over months and months, hours and hours of writing a lot of garbage and refining it into something readable. I’m not ashamed of their being remnants of that imperfection, but I want to give everyone the best experience possible!
So if you’ve bought the first edition, thank you! You have a limited edition item with remnants of my imperfect writing that will disappear on the Winter Solstice. You have the Fall Equinox 2025 edition! We’ll see if there are any more errors that pop up, let me know if you find one!
The blog’s image is the planet positions on 10/21. Obviously not to scale. Don’t forget to look outside at night (no matter where you are) to try to spot some planets!