The international edition of A WIZARD ABROAD is almost ready!

It’ll be ready to go up at the DianeDuane.com ebookstore in a few days, and will be available at the Kindle Store a day or so after that. (Please note: this ebook is not the updated “Author’s Cut” version of A Wizard Abroad, as per this link. That will be coming out over the summer. This is the version of the original AWAb that will be available to purchasers outside the US and Canada.)

I’m doing my last pass through the file for typos and so forth today. However, if anyone’s interested in helping, I could use some extra pairs of eyes to look the book over in the next couple of days and catch any typos or whatnot I missed.

Want to help hunt the typos? Here’s how it’ll work.

What I need are three people with Kindles and three people with e-readers or other devices that are .ePub- friendly. (iPads or whatever.) I’ll send those people copies of the book (and after we’ve got the final checks completed and the master files revised to remove any final errors, I’ll be happy to autograph the ebooks for those who helped out: this quick little YouTube video shows how it’s done). The folks involved also need to have the time to look over the book within the next couple of days, as I’d like to get the book online by Wednesday if at all possible.

Those interested in helping should let me know today or this evening via Twitter, at @dduane (and please add the hashtag #awizardabroad so I’ll have no trouble finding the tweets) or by commenting underneath this post.  (Just add “Kindle” or “epub” to the tweet or comment so I’ll know what format you’d prefer to work with. Also, feel free to retweet the original tweet if you feel like spreading the fun around.)

Tomorrow morning (Irish time) I’ll use the random number generator at Random.org to pick out the winners, and I’ll contact them via Tweet or in the comment area underneath the post. Once we’ve got contact details sorted out, I’ll mail everybody copies of the ebooks as soon as possible tomorrow.

The ebook is fairly clean at the moment, but I want to make sure everything’s been caught before it goes out. (BTW, unlike some previous YW Int’l ebooks, this one was not recycled from someone else’s pirated scan. It’s a clean scan of the 1993 SF Book Club hardcover, which was the first US edition. The pirated editions are all scans of the UK paperback and are therefure useless for this purpose, as I’m using the original US spelling, punctuation and usage as the preferred style for the international editions.) The three things I’m looking to catch at the moment are:

• Misspellings, obviously (some always seem to sneak in no matter how clean the scan is)
• Words with spurious spaces inserted in them (as in “profli gate”)
• Straight quotes or apostrophes where there should be curly quotes or apostrophes

…So that’s pretty much it. Get in touch if you’re interested! And thanks in advance for your help.