Another Good Thing About Self-Publishing

There are loads of good things about self-publishing.  Sure, I'll admit it probably isn't for everyone.  And if it's for you, you're probably already aware of the good things.  If you're on the fence, though, here's another thing to sway you to the Dark Side.  (Yes, we have cookies.  We just have to make them ourselves.)

What am I talking about today?  The joy of updating your own books in pretty-much real time. 

Find a typo after the book is already published?  Worse yet, a reader finds one and emails you?  Egads.  If you're traditionally published, I'm guessing you're screwed.  (I wouldn't know for certain.  Maybe a traditionally published author will stop by and confirm or deny my assertion.)  I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through to get the publisher to fix a typo - if they even bother for such a minor mistake.  If you're self-published, you can root out the flaw, fix it, and upload your book again.  It might take twelve hours.  (Amazon says up to 72 hours, but it's never taken that long for me.)  Usually, the corrected version is available for readers by the next morning at the latest. 

Now, over the weekend, I was updating back matter in my other books to reflect the addition of Blink of an I to my stable of novels.  Every time I uploaded one of my backlist to Amazon, it found a few errors.  Sure, some of them weren't really misspellings - for instance, in the phrase 'tox screen', tox is not spelled wrong.  And meth is meth is meth... unless you want to spell out methamphetamine which is a pain and characters rarely use the whole word when speaking anyway.  But it did find a couple boo-boos worth fixing and re-uploading.  Like for some reason I have a brainfart when it comes to spelling disdain.  I want it to be distain.  Derp.  (I have distain on my shirt that won't come out.  LOL)  (Yes, JC, we missed one.)

In this case, Amazon is providing an extra set of eyes.  My editor and I catch most everything, but we're not infallible.   In a 65,000 to 100,000+ word manuscript, stuff happens.  The big 'Zon caught, at most 16 errors in one book.  (Again, most of which weren't really errors, but it let me choose to ignore the issue on those things I verified weren't actual errors.)  Everything in every book got fixed or ignored and life is good.  And the experience is better for the readers.  Yay!

And yes, there's another other good thing about self-publishing.  You can update your back matter at the drop of a tissue.  (I haven't done them all yet, but I CAN, which is something you have to beg the gods of traditional publishing for on your backlist and hope they grant your prayer.  AD, NC, and BF are done.  I'll get the others today.)  Publish a new book?  Put a link to it in all your other books.  On several occasions, I've had people read one book after the other - I assume because I made it easy for them to find all my other books at the back.  It takes a few minutes for each book, but it's so worth it.

So, there's my thought for the day.  Still on the fence?  That's okay.  You can still make your own cookies.  ;o)