Discovered a massive screw-up with the formatting on my VATICAN ASSASSIN this week - both on the eBook and the paperback. I *think* it happened a couple years ago when I switched from Open Office to Word for word processing, but I'm not sure. It's fixed, now.
About one-third of the text in the book – and so in the source file – which should have been in italics had, for some reason, reverted back to normal text at random, sporadic intervals! Where three paragraphs had been in italics, now only two would still be italicized, the other back to normal text. One sentence would hold its italics, the one after revert back to normal. Here and there formerly italicized phrases somehow reverted back to normal, throughout the book.
That meant much of BC's inner monologue was now out of context. And though thoughts can be in different tenses, as speech and dialog can be, with the italics removed the book now read with jarring changes in tense in what looked like the narrative, not BC's thoughts.
Discovered all of the new editions of VATICAN ASSASSIN I'd created at the end of 2012 suffered from this flaw, paperback and eBook. I was horrified. Baffled as well. Again, I don't really know how it happened, but I figure it was somehow tied into that change in word processors. Maybe switching from Open Office to Word caused the reversion? It's purely a guess.
Thursday night I started going through the source file re-italicizing BC's thoughts. Even spent some time on it before going out on Friday night. Saturday morning I started through the file a second time, catching phrases and words I'd missed first time through.
With the text corrected, I then prepped the files for all the different eBook stores and printers, uploaded them, and began getting the corrected version back out into the world again in the afternoon. That's why the podcast was so late on Saturday – wanted to get the text corrected first.
One consolation is that the eBook is Free and thus easy to replace.
The corrected eBook is already available at Amazon for the Kindle, at DriveThruFiction and at Smashwords. Other eBook retailers will catch up later as distribution filters the new version out. Paperback distribution takes longer. It will be a little while before the paperbacks arrive at Amazon and most other retailers. You can pick them up at Lulu right now.
Here are links to the corrected versions:
FREE eBook at Amazon (Kindle):
http://www.amazon.com/Vatican-Assassin-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B001F5188C/
FREE eBook at Smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/2006
FREE eBook at Drive Thru Fiction:
http://www.drivethrufiction.com/product/100092/Vatican-Assassin
Paperback at Lulu.com:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/mike-luoma/vatican-assassin/paperback/product-21888767.html
The Vatican Assassin Trilogy – Omnibus Second Edition also suffered from this formatting error, and is also now fixed. As it retails for $6.99, I'll personally replace anyone's copy in the format of their choice. Just email me and let me know where you bought your original and in what format, and I'll send back a corrected copy. Although, if you purchased yours through Drive Thru you should be able to just grab the freshly corrected files from them. They're good like that. The Omnibus has been corrected at Drive Thru, Amazon and Smashwords, with distribution elsewhere in the pipeline.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
- Mike
