That Book You Have Might Be a Collector's Item

Luxembourg. Find me on a map--I dare you.

It was a banner weekend in Authorland. Granted, when you're Christina Dudley (which I'm, as Foghorn Leghorn would say), Authorland is a postage-stamp-sized country with occasional bursts of activity but generally not a heckuva lot going on. Kind of like Luxembourg.

As any aspiring author will tell you, far harder than writing a book is finding folks to read it. That is, marketing your finished darling. So imagine my surprise and delight on Friday when a friend called to say The Beresfords had been reviewed in the Seattle Times! Since I have no connections there, and since the Times has a policy of not reviewing self-published books, I can only imagine the reviewer received standard publicity information from University Book Store and could not resist the siren call of Jane Austen.

While the review was generally positive--she called The Beresfords "ingenious and entertaining"(!)--the reviewer did catch a double typo in my Acknowledgements section, where I misspelled Fanny Price's name as "Fannie Price." Uh-huh. How far would you trust any Austen spin-off writer who can't even spell the name of the Austen character correctly? Not as far as you could throw your boxed set of hardback Austen novels, I'm betting. Mea culpa. I must have had my own "Frannie" on the brain and gotten a little sloppy. Don't all authors write their Acknowledgements section over a glass of wine and an episode of Mad Men?

In any case, my whole point in mentioning this is to announce that those of you holding early Kindle/Nook editions or first-run printed copies are now proud owners of COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS. No kidding.

Everyone knows mistakes breed value. Look at the 1631 "Adulterous Bible"! This printing of the King James version left a crucial "not" out of one of the Ten Commandments, having Almighty God tell the Israelites, "Thou shalt commit adultery." Whoopee (literally)! All bets are off! Only eleven known copies of the Adulterous Bible exist, and wouldn't you just love to get your hands on one, especially if you've had a fond eye on your neighbor's wife.

Right there, in black and white. Go for it.

I did notice my "Fannie" mistake before attention was called to it, and had already corrected it for a guest blog post for the Calico Critic, but the Times review inspired me to actually fix the screw-up. Because, in this day and age, and as a self-published author, I can. Almost instantly.

If you download the updated Kindle or Nook editions, your copy will have "Fanny" Price in the Acknowledgements. And if you order your printed copy off Amazon, not only will "Fanny" be fixed, but I also corrected the leading (line spacing) in all the initial paragraphs of each chapter and the two unjustified paragraphs on page 203. That's the good news. The bad news, of course, is that these unspecial, correctly-spelled and -formatted books are now run-of-the-mill and common as dirt.

Should you still want a Collector's Edition, however, I have one last box of them and would be happy to share them with you at the signing! Hope to see some of you this Wednesday, July 18, at 6:30 p.m., University Book Store Bellevue. Don't worry if you can't make it--you can still enter to win the giveaway for a free Kindle copy on the Calico Critic!