First, let me apologize to anyone reading this who is not an author. I felt the need to share what happened to me recently that might happen to someone else.
Recently I was trying to set up Dropbox on my laptop so I could share my writing from iPad and the Scrivener app I have been using to publish my books for quite a few years. Suddenly I thought I saw all my hard drive files loading into Dropbox. Panic mode! I quickly highlighted the files in question and deleted them.
Then in perusing my laptop, I noticed all my documents were gone. Yikes. Honestly, at this point I was in a total panic. I began searching for the files. Not sure what happened, but I think I found them in the cloud and downloaded them. Anyway, my documents were now safely stored on my hard drive.
A few days later, I had time to begin reading through Tangled Secrets, one of my recently published books in paperback. I was sad to note that in the uploading process, somehow the page flow was off. It looked as if a chapter might be finished, only to turn the page and see the scene continue. Not sure how this happened, but I knew I had to fix it right away. Authors like to make sure the products they sell are a pleasant reading experience for the reader.
I headed to find the document and remembered I had cleaned up the desktop files. Surely, I had moved the Word document into the appropriate folder. But it was gone. Completely gone. I headed to the trash folder and found it empty. Another thing I'd done to clean up the computer. Then I searched for the Scrivener file and it, too, was missing...for all my books!!
I searched through old computers, flash drives, and everything I could think of to find the book files, but they were gone. I also noted that the documents I'd downloaded from my cloud were showing up in two other places on the computer. What??? I searched through all of them, finding no book files.
This was an author's nightmare. Finally, in desperation, I went to Amazon and downloaded the pdf file. I tried trials of two different programs, including Acrobat, in an attempt to turn the pdf into a word file. I was successful with Acrobat, but it was impossible to fix the page flow.
As a last result I reached out to Amazon KDP to see if they would send me a copy of my uploaded file. After proving my identity, (thank you Amazon), I now have a copy of the book I need to change. I'll be doing that today and uploading it again so I can republish. For any of my readers, who purchased the paperback with the page issues, I sincerely apologize. Thankfully, the ebook version did not have these issues.
As an author, I am very happy Amazon KDP is there to help me when I need it, and in a very timely manner. I also have learned my lesson and will never again think I don't need to pay for a proof copy before publishing!
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