A lot of you got ARC copies which were pre-proof anyway, but for those of you who didn't, I wanted to pass on some info and offer an apology.
A recent review complaining about the book's editing (claiming it seemed like it hadn't been edited at all) slapped me in the face this weekend. I have NEVER gotten a complaint about the editing on any of my books, and I'm 26 books into my career at this point. An occasional error caught, sure. It happens even with traditionally published books with big teams of editors behind them, but seeming to be completely uneditied/error-ridden ... I pride myself that this just isn't how I put out books.
So after a couple sleepless nights and asking my reader group for help, I got a few wonderful author friends to help me go through it and see what the problem is.
Today, I found at least one error I REMEMBER fixing during one of my editing sweeps. With little things like commas and hyphens, I don't really remember every one I correct, but this is a place where I had the word "play" and meant "pay" and I remember it SPECIFICALLY because when I caught it, I remember thinking, "Dang it, I KNOW I shared that quote as a 'teaser' on my social media multiple times. How did I never see that?"
So my guess at this point: at some point I saved over my file with an earlier version and didn't realize it. The version that went live on Amazon was NOT the version I wanted to present as my finished project, and I apologize for that.
That said, even with that knowledge and having some really great friends searching through the book for me, looking for anything I missed, my anxiety/shame/etc has been slightly mollified because people aren't finding as much as I feared. I convinced myself that it would be like error-ridden, every page, and it's not. It's a couple per chapter ... mostly missing commas, and ... I don't know. Commas are kind of invisible to the average reader (if you are counting commas while you are reading a story, the author did something wrong).
So, I'm glad I didn't panic and pull the book.
If you purchased on Amazon and have found a significant amount of errors, give it a few days for me to upload the new version, then go to your kindle dashboard and see if there is an "update" available.
There will be no changes to plot or anything, but I'm hoping to hunt down the errors that sneaked their way in through the back door after I kicked them out the front.