4 years late, my first book finally has an index

A book that happened by accident - and what went wrong

Back in 2022 I wrote and self-published my first book.

I did it because other people said I should.

And I did it all by myself, because I wasn't in a position to be able to afford to buy in the book editing, design, etc services that would have helped me spot and avoid any 'rookie gaffes'.

And just like anyone else who's ever self-published their own book, it was only after it started to appear in other people's hands that hindsight arrived (late as always) to point out to me all of those 'rookie gaffes' that I'd somehow failed to spot, before pressing the button to release it onto the wild and onto bookshelves.

My mistakes didn't impact on its success - that that doesn't mean they shouldn't be fixed 

Encouragingly, none of these gaffes which loom large for me seemed to have been spotted by the hundreds of readers all around the world who've bought copies of it and passed them around; they've not stopped the book from winning an award; and they've not prevented interest in it's ideas continuing to catch interest (4 years on, and people are still buying copies of it - without paid for advertising most self-published books stop making sales within a year, but I've never paid for any adverts for it).

But one of those oversights has always niggled me - I omitted to include an index to help readers navigate it. And I have an idea that indexes are also important because they reveal some of the insights and sources of inspiration that the author has drawn on in drafting their book: 

A novel approach to getting the missing pages in readers' hands? 

So 4 years on from when it originally appeared, I've now gotten to creating an index for it - and I'm taking what I think may be a world first approach in how I'm sharing this:

Most people would probably assume that the easiest thing to do would be for me to update the book's manuscript and send this back to the printers. But to my thinking, there's 2 problems with this:

1) it means that everyone who's already bought a copy will miss out on these bonus pages;

2) it means that I'm retrospectively editing the history of the book so that how it's read in the future will be different to how it was read in the past. That somehow doesn't sit well with me: the book as it currently has been that way for the last 4 years in its original form. And its in this form that its generated so many unexpected outcomes that I'm working on a sequel volume to it. To change it now would mean that future readers have different experiences of it, creating inconsistencies in it's own story and history as a book.

So instead, I'm choosing to make these extra index pages freely available to download and share as a 'print and stick in the back of your copy' approach.

This feels far more in keeping with some of the book's ethos in encouraging people to take a more hands-on approach to trying new ways of doing things - and for anyone who's wondering if it might be worth spending a few pounds to get their own copy, it offers an insight into some of the different themes and references I drew on in writing it.

To get your copy of the missing index to 'Loving Your Doubt' -

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NCYAIF6Fu63W2-USxP5tMtg_aM7w3hXA/view?usp=drive_link

And for those of you who grab these pages, I'd be interested to know:

1) if you're a previous reader, has it changed how you now think about the book?

2) if you haven't read the book yet, how far does getting it's index influence the likelihood you might get a copy in the future?