Maybe Not Too Picky

After blogging about The Power of Two on Tuesday and that I'm still finding formatting mistakes after going through it many, many times, I began to wonder if I was being to picky. Then Tuesday night I started reading an ebook of an old favorite from the 90s. The book had clearly been scanned in the way mine has been.

No, I decided as obvious error after obvious error jerked me out of the story, I'm not being too picky.

It was so annoying and I know most of the errors are attributable to OCR scanning. I've spotted some of the same errors in my scans and cleaned them up. This author must have done some work, but not enough. What kinds of things did I see?

*Instead of a closing quote mark ", there was a parenthesis )

*Dialogue from two different characters that should have been in two different paragraphs mashed together into one paragraph.

*Weird breaks in the middle of paragraphs.

*There was one place with two capital letters MI that I never did figure out what it was supposed to be instead of that. And believe me, I wasted some time trying to come up with an answer.

*And many more errors.

All of which jerked me out of the story. So again, I apologize for the time it's taking to get TPOT ready for ebook release, but there's no way I'm putting my work out there with mistakes like this. Yes, I'll miss some, but I want them to be few and far between. I want you to be able to enjoy Cai and Jake's story, not be cursing errors.

The Power of Two Update

I've been getting a lot of emails lately asking when The Power of Two will be released in ebook format, so I thought I'd do a quick update here for others who might want to know, but haven't taken the time to contact me.

The short answer is soon. It's in work.

The longer answer is that I meant to have it out already and I'm sorry that it's taking so long. Part of the reason is how busy I am. My day job was relocated from Minneapolis to Atlanta, and while I technically have the same position, the job duties have expanded hugely. I'm usually more tired now because my brain gets a work out and I get home two hours later than I did in Minnesota.

The other issue I'm running into with TPOT is that so much of the text is italicized. I had the book scanned in and the words were sorted out by an OCR program. The accuracy rate for italicized text is much lower than regular typeface, and every time I think I'm on my final read through, I find more errors. As a perfectionist, I want the book as error free as possible, but it's a time consuming process to fix them because I'm working in the coded document. This means there is formatting language and symbols everywhere and I've fixed one issue only to introduce a new problem.

Anyway, I'm pushing for soon-ish on this book, maybe within a couple of months. I'm trying to schedule time to work on it between my day job and writing new words. The cover is done, though.

So please bear with me as I struggle to squeeze error searching into my day. Again, I apologize for the time it's taking. I'm moving it up the priority list as we speak. :-) And thank you for wanting this book enough to contact me about it! That is very much appreciated.

Here's The Power of Two

I've had my covers for a while now, but wanted to wait to show them off. I'm impatient, though, and I couldn't wait any longer to share. I'm showcasing them one at a time. The appearances on my blog are the grand premiere. :-)

Without any further chatter from me, I present The Power of Two!

Isn't it awesome? I love the background especially. It has a really nice future feel to it. I did the searching for the couple on the cover. It was amazingly hard to find a picture that fit and I finally had to go for the best that I could find. The woman in the picture was listed as being Chinese and my heroine, Cai, is 1/4 Vietnamese. Also, both models look older than my hero and heroine are in the story. Cai is 21 and Jake is in his mid-20s. Like I said, though, there were very few pictures to choose from and I picked the best one available. But while the couple isn't exactly right, the cover is still awesome!

This concludes the new cover premieres. I hope you enjoyed looking at them as much as I enjoyed showing them off!