So the worst thing I could imagine happened this week: My latest release was missing a few chapters.

Imagine my horror when I opened my email at 6:00 a.m. and read a message from a reader who VERY KINDLY AND GENEROUSLY alerted me to the problem.

I was horrified! I flipped over to Amazon and looked at the book, hoping there had been a mistake and NOPE – there were really missing chapters. ***Insert the screaming and cursing scene here ***

So like a LUNATIC, I formatted and uploaded another version. That one was complete, but I couldn’t remember if I had made all of the edits on that version and I had only 1 hour before I had to be at work – but I just wanted to stop the bleeding and I knew the version I used as the replacement was nearly perfect because I speed-read through it!

I have NO CLUE how it happened in the first place.

I have been getting steady reviews on that book, and the chapters that were missing were REALLY IMPORTANT to the storyline – so I’m sure other readers wouldn’t have given me 5 stars if they were missing say…the most important scenes in the book. (BTW, they were also some of my favorite scenes) This is a real head-scratcher for me, because I downloaded it from Amazon when I first published it and just finished re-reading it on my own Kindle – and that version was complete so how and when did it get replaced (because it definitely did)?

I will never solve this mystery but I did go back through the complete version and re-checked every single edit, every chapter, and did it TWICE after I uploaded it again. So I’m sure the complete book is there. I am forever grateful to the readers who emailed me about the error because I would have never known!

I am horribly embarrassed because as an Indie, I feel a certain pressure to be even more vigilant about the quality of my work. I apologize wholeheartedly to anyone who read the version with the missing chapters. I’m horrified (still) and paranoid (more) that something like this could happen again.

I did learn one important thing: those of you who read my books really do care because you took the time to let me know about the problem. I will be forever grateful for that. The missing chapter fiasco ruined my day, but the loyalty and generosity of my readers really made it better. Thank you.