A confession and cautionary tale about last-minute draft changes

 I have a grievous literary error to confess.

As I was working on my fourth historical romance, What Wakes the Heart, I struggled with the name of the male protagonist. He was a Polish immigrant living in Cowbird Creek, Nebraska, and I wanted him to use an Anglicized first name. I puzzled over when to use that form of his name and when to use his true name, as well as what both those names should be. Until shortly before publication, my answer to the latter question was John and Jan (the latter pronounced "yahn"). I even had a scene in which he told Susannah (the female protagonist) about the immigration workers' reaction to his name, their initial confusion quickly yielding to a series of jests.

The problem was: "Jan" reads as a female name in English, and I didn't want my readers constantly stumbling and doing double-takes. ("Wait, who's Jan, and when did she walk in?") So at pretty much the last minute, I replaced John and Jan with Carl and Karol. The "k" in Karol would, I hoped, keep readers from confusing it with the girl's name Carol. To implement this change, I used "find and replace," though I checked each use of either name to make sure I'd picked the correct name, Anglicized or original.

All very well -- but only this morning, more than seven months after I published the book, did I realize to my horror that I'd failed to search for the possessive "John's." And once I did that search, I found an abundance of them. Anyone reading the book would have realized how sloppy I'd been. Most series readers find the Cowbird Creek series via Kindle Unlimited, and I have little doubt that many of them gave up the book partway through in irritation and perhaps disgust. I may have lost series readers permanently. And I've contributed to the poor opinion many readers still have of self-published books.

Mea culpa -- mea maxima culpa.

Once I discovered my error, I made haste to correct the Kindle and paperback editions of the book. As of this writing (May 17th, 1 p.m. EDT), the corrected Kindle edition is already live, and the paperback should follow soon. So here is my plea: if you started What Wakes the Heart and set it aside because of the sudden intrusions of unexplained "John's," please consider giving it another try. I am hardly objective, but I consider it a pretty good book, both as historical fiction and as romance. And I promise not to make the same mistake again. (As for other mistakes . . . no promises, but I'll try to be more generally careful.)

Here's the cover, which I hope may please or intrigue a few of you.

 And here's the Amazon link. The paperback is also available at Barnes & Noble and other retailers, though the corrected version won't appear there for more than a week.