Proof that the left and right sides of the brain don’t always communicate…

A few weeks ago I published three Supplements to the Herbert West Series. I added information about, and a link to said series at the end of each one.

A week or so later, I decided finally to change the url to the HW Series page on my blog. It used to be audreydriscoll.com/the-herbert-west-trilogy, because in the dim past, there were only three books. Thinking the middle one, Islands of the Gulf, was too long, I clove it in two and published it accordingly, thus turning the trilogy into a… tetralogy? Ugh. Quartet? Too pretentious. I settled for the rather mundane term “series.” But I didn’t think to change the term in the url linking to the page that has all the information about the series and where to aquire it. No one ever really looks at urls, do they? In blog posts I attach the link to text; someone clicking on that would never see the actual url.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that it was dumb to have misleading information floating around. It’s not a trilogy, so why suggest it is, even in an obscure bit of text such as a url? I changed it to: audreydriscoll.com/the-herbert-west-series. Self-congratulations all around. I even went back to old blog posts linked to that page and updated the link there. Take note: when you change the url for a page, WordPress doesn’t propagate the change through all the posts linked to that page.

But, of course, I had just invalidated the link I had added to my three new ebooks (the Supplements). To make matters worse, I didn’t pick up on this until after a considerable number of those ebooks had been downloaded by potential readers during a free promotion. Aaaaargh! Now I’m imagining annoyed readers clicking on the bad link, saying “Nuts to that!” when they get an error message, and thus missing out on the delights of reading the main series. All because I (the author and publisher) didn’t bother to change the url as soon as the trilogy became a series, or at least think to upload corrected versions of the ebooks before the free promo days.

I shall refrain from pointing out the obvious.

Well, no I won’t. Because maybe it isn’t all that obvious: Sweat the small stuff.

Like these two guys.

Images courtesy of Pixabay.