I appear to have fallen victim to the most minor identity theft of all time; a single charge of just over $50 to a Family Dollar in Atlanta, Georgia that just showed up on my online statement.  As I have not been to Atlanta at any point in my life, much less in the last two days, I quickly cancelled the card and get to go to my bank branch tomorrow and do a spot of paperwork.  I checked all of the rest of my cards and they’re all clean; this weekend I’ll change all of my passwords.

Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of trying to add an “Also by Luther Siler” page to my pre-existing ebook manuscript for The Benevolence Archives.  It led me down this lovely little rabbit hole where, after adding that page, a Prostetnic logo, and fixing the three places where I screwed up and referred to Lady Remember as “he,” the Amazon converter that turns my .doc file into a .mobi for the Kindle told me I had thirty-some spelling errors.   The vast majority of them were words with no spaces in between, which is not normally a typo I’d allow to slide past– much less thirty times.

I checked the manuscript.   Spaces in the proper places, every single time.  Weirdly, the word before the space tended to be a single italicized word.  In other words:

“I can’t believe Amazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.

became

“I can’t believeAmazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.

I actually rewrote every set of words where this happened, sometimes removing the italics and a few times where I felt they were really necessary leaving them in but carefully italicizing just the word and nothing else.  Viewed the file in two or three different ways to make sure it wasn’t an artifact of the viewer’s insistence on full justification.  Nothing made any difference.  The next step is to put two spaces after each of those words and see if that fixes it.  I promise the spaces are there in the source document; this is just a weird-ass artifact of the conversion process, and at the moment I don’t have a way to turn a .doc into a .mobi on my computer to dodge the need to use their converter.

Then, once I gave up on that frustration for the evening, I discovered that for some reason it doesn’t seem to be pushing the updated version through to my Kindle anyway, so the new version, which ought to be pushed out to replace old versions for anyone who hasn’t deliberately turned that feature off, appears to only be working for new downloads– and since I’ve already downloaded the book, I can’t download it again to double-check– I’ve tried to force my Kindle to update the file every way I can think of and it won’t do it, so I can’t check to see if the typos are just in the online viewer and I can’t get the book to recognize that the “Also by” page is supposed to be there.  It won’t work on the Kindle app on my phone or my actual Kindle, although come to think of it I may not have downloaded the app on my new iPad so I may try that next.

So yeah.  I’m frustrated.  If, by some magic, you happen to download BA from Amazon tonight, I’d appreciate you letting me know if you get a version of the file with the “Also by Luther” page at the back– you’d be able to tell immediately, because the Prostetnic Publications logo is on the first page in the new one too.  I need to know if the changes went through and if the space-omissions are there– they’re most common in the story called “Remember”.

Might even throw in a free copy of the new book once it comes out, actually, if you were to do that and tell me what happened.

(EDIT: Okay, I may have figured out the non-updating thing, as apparently you need to increment the “edition” number to make Amazon realize the new file is “important” changes.  I’ve done that.  The version up there now should still be different for new buyers, though, so the deal in the previous two paragraphs still stands. I have a hunch those errors will disappear when viewed on an actual Kindle device or through the app.)