There is little more annoying to an author than reading your own published book and finding stupid mistakes you should have caught. When Switching Plans came out last month, I had a copy downloaded to my phone, but it wasn’t until a couple of days later that I actually got around to reading it — it was a busy weekend.

I immediately caught two mistakes that I should’ve fixed in the editing process. One was during one of the spanking scenes — a scene you can get to a lot of different ways, so it’s likely to have been seen. It’s a relatively minor continuity mistake, one that I don’t think a lot of people would have noticed, but I noticed it. The other was a fairly-glaring missed edit on one of the pages. Both fixes were quick, but it still bothered me. I’ve been through that book dozens of times; how did I miss these? Did I miss more stuff?

I’m reminded of when I first read through my very first non-erotica short-story collection (published under a different name). I found about twenty errors that I had to go back and fix. Yes, this was much earlier in my publishing career (relatively speaking) but it still bugged me. Now that I’ve been doing this longer, it bugs me even more.

Part of the problem is that I do almost all of my own editing. Getting someone to read one of your books isn’t easy, unless you want to pay them, although the last time I paid for an edit that editor still missed things. Not a lot of things, but things nonetheless. So I’d rather just save the money and do it myself, and ask my friends to help out. If enough friends look at the book, I’m bound to catch everything, right?

Apparently not. But when you have to do everything solo, finding errors and fixing them with re-uploads to the publishing platform are just a part of life. A shitty part of life, but a part of life nonetheless.