There was a new review of my e-novel mystery Loonies in Hollywood, based on the true life unsolved mystery of silent film director William Desmond Taylor. Of course my fictional screenwriter amateur sleuth solved it.

But . . .

This is not a complaint about the four star review.

However, you need to read it see what we must chat about: “This book was very entertaining in that it provided a believable solution to the murder of WDT. I was quite disconcerted, however, with the amount of spelling and grammatical errors; it’s as if the entire book had been edited by a third grader! Therefore, while the book was entertaining, the experience of reading was compromised.”

What happened?

I used a software formatter to change the Word. doc to a file for Amazon. Before doing that I checked through my document dozens of times. I did a spell check in Word, found no errors. My formatter found no errors. Two for two. When I loaded the book at Amazon I did their spell check. No errors. Three for three.

So what happened? I did everything I could to insure the reading experience was good. So I went to the formatter and sent the same file to Amazon. After the book was uploaded, there was a spell check and Amazon found no errors. 

I believe the person who wrote the review. No one is going to give a four star review and complain about spelling and grammar mistakes.

Clearly something goes wrong. So I checked with Amazon. Here is what they said:

“I checked and confirmed that there were 4 potential typo errors found by our spellcheck tool, but no grammatical or other errors were found.

Here are the ones:

booklegger: location 1425
jimjam: location 28
melo: location 2343
xxxxxx: location 2709

I understand that the above mentioned errors may actually be contextually accurate so no action would be required to correct them which is why the tool also gives the option to ignore them. It’s possible the issue is with their device or reading app that some spacing or other formatting errors may appear.

Rest assured, we’ve not received any complaints regarding the content of the eBook from any customers that we could confirm were present. We would’ve certainly notified you of the same since we strive to maintain very high standards for content published through our platform.”

Now that drives me a bit crazy. Amazon found no issues other than the four above mentioned, and all are slang words or used contextually. Is the problem with the reviewers Kindle? I don’t know.

We all want the best experience in the digital world of reading. I am sorry the customer had a bad experience, but am grateful for the four star review.

Amazon also said it is possible to contact the customer and leave a comment. And that I did.

If you purchase any of my e-Books let me know if you have problems. Thanks. My Amazon Page