Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Tell us about a writing lesson you learned the hard way.

Remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have created. You can find their works here!

I’m going to say this quite clearly: CHECK YOUR WORK.

With my second novel, As the Crow Flies, I made a monumental error. Something went wildly astray with the formatting somewhere. I think it was tied to my overcomplicating the process. The novel was written in Google Docs, before I transferred it to Scrivener for initial formatting. Not getting on particularly well with that software, I opted for Atticus and moved it over there.

Everything looked good, so I uploaded the eBook and paperback files to KDP. All pre-flight checks came back looking good, and I ordered a proof copy. And this is where I made the fatal error. I had done all my reading and edits on printouts from the word processor. NOT the printed copy. Nothing was formatted in Docs, just written. So, proof copy in hand, I skimmed it. Things looked right, so I pulled the trigger and ordered a box of author copies, putting the book live in KDP.

Then I found the error. A paragraph or two at the beginning of a chapter was duplicated and run together. I saw it in the author copies. The many copies I’d spent a few hundred Great British Pounds on. I was able to fix the issue quickly enough and reupload the amended files before a single person found it. But I will never forget that costly mistake on my part.