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The Joys of Hidden Formatting

Nothing like having friends point out when you messed up. Isn’t it wonderful to get a message from a friend currently reading your book with a copied excerpt looking like this:

“So the illusion broke,llided itt lunged for her.ng the enormous, flaming creature. clearly again. when you attacked Nadesha?” She asked slowly.”

Excerpt From: Louring, Michelle. “Resounding Echo.” Michelle Louring. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Of course the first reaction I had was to frantically look through all the different copies of the manuscript on my hard drive, hoping that the mutatilated sentence above was the result of Smashwords’ brutal Meatgrinder software. But alas, to my horror I located the same paragraph in the Kindle file I prepared by myself.

But strangely, it wasn’t to be found in my original Word document.

Word Formatting

That is, until I pressed the formatting symbol…

Formatting Error2

Isn’t it nice to know that your writing software is hiding terrible secrets from you? And even nicer that those secrets only get exposed when you decide to upload the document for the world to see!

…I really have no idea how this happened. But I do know that this error is probably in every single ebook version of Resounding Echo available at the moment.

I can only console myself with the fact that hidden formatting doesn’t show up in printed books!