[Hitch]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Given the subject matter... how mortifying. Fixed.

Perhaps you were commatose when you wrote it. ;-)

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I don't really consider this recent snafu that much of a black eye on the new Public Warning policy put in place in February. Mistakes are going to happen. I still think it will accomplish more good than harm.

There have been horror stories of midlisters having their books pulled from Amazon's store because of unwarranted "complaints" about formatting long before this new policy was put in place. The only thing "new" here are the warnings. The new warning policy did not create the problem Lee and Miller had with this book. The potential for things like this happening were ALWAYS there.

And HAVE happened. I've relayed the story here, from a few years ago--2012 or 13, if I recall correctly?--that we had a client that was a multimillionaire many times over, from bestselling books. We were doing her backlist books. The usual: scan, proof, convert, lather, rinse, repeat. Her novels, generally, were a quarter-million words. Each.

And what happened? Sure enough, some asshat reader thought that she'd make sure that we knew that the book had errors, and reported them to Amazon. 4 of them. Two were British spellings (color/colour type of thing), one was deliberate (Dr. for Doctor, or something like that) and one--ONE--was an actual error. Out of a quarter-million words. That's happened more than once, in our client base of ~2800 authors, now.

I remember several years ago when one bestselling author had a book pulled from Amazon's store simply because he ended a chapter in an "experimental" way. It was a first-person POV by a character who was trying to defuse an explosive device. The chapter ended in mid-sentence (mid-word, actually). People were sending the physical books back because they believed there was a large chunk of text missing. The ebook kept getting pulled because new readers were calling in and complaining of missing text. He (the author) swore he'd never try anything like that again.

Depending on the rest of the book, I might have been mighty pissed off; but it's hard to believe that nobody "got it." Aside from you, of course.

I wasn't fooled, of course. Not sure why it was so hard for people to figure out that the device exploded; thus interrupting the first-person narrative mid-word.

My point is: this too shall pass. Lee & Miller's troubles will end. They should take it as a sign that Liaden fans are getting more and more neophytes to try the books.

Yes, and this will CONTINUE to happen. You, Diap, have heard me rant about this topic before. While there may well be some valid good reasons, for everyday readers to report "typos" to publishers, this tattletale mindset is not helpful. NONE of these people would have emailed Random House, etc., about these miniscule mistakes, had they bought the books in paper. Nor would they hae expected that RH would turn around, say "oh, my GOD!!! typos! The Humanity!," recalled the books and reprinted them, would they?

But, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, now that people think that every book out there is typed in a day and uploaded in Word, bygod, the instant gratification squad is in full flight, insisting that authors and publishers hop to and fix everything--even if they are bloody utterly WRONG--right away.

I find typo and formatting errata in scads of books that I read. Do you really think that I email all the authors, publishers, or Amazon, commenting about how they have to fix the damn things? I found typos in Annie Lamott's "Bird by Bird." Did I report them? Hell no. Why? Because it's a BOOK. I wouldn't do it if the book was in print; I won't do it just because it's now in a digital format.

Hitch