Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

As many of you know, my first traditionally published book, Kinship War: Contact, came out a couple of weeks ago. Now this was a very big deal for me. I was hoping it would be a best seller, and I would make a ton of money from it, while also enriching the publisher who took a chance on me. If not, at least it would get my name out there. I worked on the book with Bill Fawcett, one of the big-name editors in the business. Everything looked good. The publisher, Shahid Mahmud of Arc Manor, loved it. His in-house editor, Lezlie Robyn, loved it. Everything looked good, until the release.

The first I got wind that something was off was when I looked over the first two reviews. One was a five star, the other a four. The four-star review stated that while they loved the book, the formatting and editing was non-existent. How could that be? We had so many eyes look over the book that it had to be near perfect. I dismissed that review, which looked like so many others I have received on my work, as the opinion of someone who found a couple of very minor errors, and made Mt. Everest out of an anthill. In retrospect, I should have looked the manuscript as published over. Then, at the end of last week, a good friend of mine sent a personal message to me on Facebook, detailing some of the things he had found. Formatting, sections running together, all in all a very poor manuscript.

I contacted Shahid yesterday. Arc Manor is a small company, but they publish stories by people like Larry Niven and some newly found versions of Heinlein classics. Mike Resnik edits Galaxy’s Edge for them. And so many of the big names I know in the industry swear that Shahid is an honest publisher with integrity, something rare in the publishing landscape of today. He looked into the matter, wondering if some other copy of the manuscript had mistakenly been published. He emailed me today and said that he was pulling the manuscript from all outlets for forty-eight hours for an emergency edit. I didn’t get an explanation, and really it didn’t matter. I have to depend on Arc Manor to make it right.

Anyone who has bought the eBook will be able to get a new copy when it is republished. I will blog that event when it happens. For those who bought a paperback, Arc Manor will replace it. In the US they will ship a new copy free of charge. Out of the US they need to charge for shipping. Not my call. The original should be mailed to:

ATTN: Returns

Arc Manor LLC

P.O. Box 10339

Rockville, MD 20849-0339

Be sure to include your return address for the new copy.

To swap an eBook, email a copy of your receipt to admin@arcmanor.com

I think you will be able to swap it on Amazon by just downloading the new copy.

I’m not sure how this happened. It’s not up to me to assign blame, which does no good for anyone. I am not in charge of making this right, and have to allow the publisher to do so. I do apologize for not paying attention to that early review. The quality of the story is my business. I hope that anyone who received on of the bad copies will not be put off from the series. That’s all we can do.