Someday soon, I hope I shall release a book without the self-sabotage which inevitably accompanies it. You'd think after following the release process 29 times, I'd have it sussed. Nope - the 30th time was the worst yet!
Couldn't be further from the truth. Finger trouble, network failure and sheer incompetence, that well-known threesome, combined to make this one the worst muck-up yet!
A wee while ago, I thought I was putting up the edited version of 13 Esbats of the Moon. Instead I managed to upload an old story I'd been sprucing up with the possibility of turning it into the final Hengist book. I'd copied and pasted the title page, from my latest, but not altered the title.
Must Check More Than Title Page!
Despite finishing the editing rounds 2 weeks ahead of schedule, I was still getting (really important!) comments from beta readers 2 days before the deadline. Did I upload it then, like a smart author would have done? No, I did not. Because it sometimes takes 3 days for a new version to upload, and 2 betas were close to finishing, I waited, wanting to get every last teeny-tiny-typo.
BIG MISTAKE.
An hour before the deadline, I spotted the last comment in my inbox - literally a "you" should have been a "your" (one of my very frequent offenders!)
So I added that r, pressed save and went to make a celebratory cup of tea.
On my return, the internet had thrown all of its toys out of the pram, and it stayed down for the remaining 55 minutes, each one of which was a combination of angry frustration, pleading promises and "why me?" tears. How many times in an hour can you reboot routers/laptops, connect to "secured, no internet" portals and fail to notice the big yellow cable which had dropped off? Lots. Tons. Stacks.
The result of this worst hour of my life in living memory? All those kind people who pre-ordered got a racy, (unpolished) military thriller with some decidedly unsavoury scenes instead of the sweet, clean medieval romance/cozy mystery they were expecting.
To add insult to injury, my failure to notice the credit-card expiry meant my copy was
not delivered on the stroke of midnight and it was several hours before I figured why. Grrr. At this point steam was figuratively pouring from every available orifice. (Ewww - nasty image!)
Any minute now, the lovely Winston will have finished getting the rush-through re-pub finished and I can start telling peeps about this conclusion to one of the most difficult story arcs I've ever tried to write. So many ambitious threads from a cast of jolly-near GoT proportions (relatively speaking - there are over 13 different women all having a crack at the mic in this one).
Did I pull it off? Only smarties know the answer.
Nature's Tribe Books 1-4 is the first in the Hengist Boxset collection which tells the epic saga of Archer's Medieval-alternate-world.
