This will be a short post. The universal complaint about self-published books is that they are poorly edited. They need a content editor, line editor, and proof-reader. In my book The Candy Store Generation a fried read it after publishing and found four or five errors (in 196 pages). At some point I’ll fix those and re-publish.

Today I was looking at Doctor Luke’s Assistant on Amazon, specifically at the “Customers who bought this book also bought…” section. I clicked on one of those. I won’t say what the book was. It has 13 reviews to my 12 for DLA, but a significantly lower rating mix. As I usually do I checked the lower ratings, and they contained the “lots of errors” complaint. Sine the book has a “Look Inside” feature, I went inside. The book opens like this:

On the 29th of Sivan, in the year 2449, between the Wilderness of Paran and the Wilderness of Tzin, west of Egypt and south of Canaan, in a remote desert location known as Kadesh-Barnea or Ein-Mishpat, there were fourteen hours, four minutes and forty seconds of light in a day.

I stopped there. Kadesh-Barnea is on the Sinai Peninsula, the first watering hole south of Israel/Canaan and EAST of Egypt, not WEST.

A minor detail, perhaps, but important enough that someone who knows a smidgen of geography will be turned off and not buy the book. I’d like to contact the author and advise him to fix it, but not sure that I should.

I hope I hope I hope that, in my books, I haven’t mixed up east and west anywhere.