Amazon –
Those of you who’ve popped in here before will know there have been a few glitches with Amazon, and the latest was an email last week alerting me to 10 typos in the text of Turn of the Tide, which, if I didn’t sort them and re-load by the 4th February, would result in the book being flagged as having ‘issues’.
Now I wasn’t responsible for the production of the original text, my publisher was, but having bought back the rights, of course it’s my pigeon. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world for me to edit the ePub file using Calibre 
in fact as I’d never done it before it took me an entire day. First to find the rogue errors (not easy – although Amazon helpfully provide the locations, those numbers don’t relate in any way to page numbers in the hard copy, nor to the system of numbering in ePub), then to fix them, heart in mouth in case I scuppered any formatting, and finally to upload the new version onto Amazon. I have to confess here that of the 10, there was one I didn’t find, so I’m just praying others don’t either! It did seem a little strange for Amazon to consider less than one typo in every 10,000 words, and all of them very minor issues – a missed out initial r in murmuring for example – as something that would ‘significantly impact on a reader’s experience’. But hey-ho, I’ve learnt something (hopefully) useful.
Postscript: I’ve just learnt that Amazon would consider 10 – 15 errors in a book of 3000 locations to be sufficiently significant to flag. So my 10 in a book of 4773 locations definitely shouldn’t have done. Ah well…