Perhaps one of my finer moments.

My last Pike Post was a glum affair, full of misery, flu and self pity (and a little bit of embarrassment – OK, a LOT of embarrassment). I remained in that frame of mind until I saw this -  

5 STAR REVIEW 

- at Amazon. 

I would have been mildly impressed had it been from someone I know, but the lady who wrote it actually doesn't know me. Furthermore, she is clearly a lady of keen wit, intelligence and great humour, with qualities of fine judgement.

It is comments like Andrea's that make it all worthwhile.

Not my finest moment ...

Have you ever had two copies of something, and used the wrong one? Not only that, have you ever had two copies of something, and edited the wrong one to a smaller size, and then used both wrong versions?


Or is it just me?


Having created a new version of the cover for Pike's Quest last week, I printed it out, realised I had made some ridiculous typos, and edited them out. Then, I saved the newly corrected picture under the same name, but I saved it into a different file. Later, I opened up the image from my 'recent' files list and trimmed it down to use as my Twitter and Facebook profile pictures.


So far, so good, except I was so confident in my capabilities that I didn't double check what I had done, and what I had done, was use the incorrect image. So I uploaded the wrong images to Amazon (.co.uk, com, and DE & FR, pretty much the world, really), Smashwords, Goodreads, Twitter and Facebook.


Since then I must have seen that image hundreds of times, but did I notice? Heck, no. Did anyone e-mail and call me a dozy git? No. Did my 14-year-old daughter ridicule me when she looked on line and saw it today? Yes, of course she did. And there was me, already feeling like %!@>~!, what with the sore head, throat and all. I had to change it, and here's why -

BAD

GOOD

BLUSH

Needless to say, as ill as I feel, I've had to make some amendments.

If you bought a copy ...

... you need to read this.

So, my writing weekend in Wales went very well. Far from being wet I was bathed in glorious sunshine.

When I wasn’t writing I was reading (I would have gone walking, but my Achilles tendon awaits an operation to repair an old rupture, and walking leads to pain ...). My chosen material was Ties that Bind, by Carolyn Arnold, and my very own Pike’s Quest.

Canadian crime writer Carolyn will be guesting on my other  blog – http://kj-bennett.blogspot.com on 9 December, so I thought it would be good to read one of her books. Sadly I am only about a third of the way through (OK, 36% - it’s pretty good so far), as I was distracted by something in Pike: I discovered several formatting errors in the latter section of the book. It’s nothing major, but it may spoil the reading experience.

The errors mainly revolve around the use if italics: where characters communicate with each other by thought, the words were supposed to be in italics. Because I had had to reformat the entire manuscript from scratch to get it into e-book format, I had failed to italicise all of these sections. I think I have now captured them all, and new versions to both Amazon and Smashwords.

I don’t want to let anyone down.

If you bought a copy before 8^th November, and you can provide a proof of purchase (we can negotiate what that means if you don’t have you’re original e-mail proof), I will send you a copy of the e-book free of charge to replace the defective one. Please use the address pike at kjbennett.co.uk (in correct format, with @ and no spaces) if you want to take me up on this.

Don't be shy, now.