How I spent forty minutes asking an AI to delete bullets that weren't there.

I finished the book.

Twelve chapters. A workbook. A premium workbook. A quick-reference card. Front matter, back matter, a launch playbook, and one very tired Shopify consultant who is, as it happens, actually on a yacht.

I should be celebrating. I am, technically. I'm writing this from an actual yacht, which feels like the kind of detail you're supposed to bury, but I refuse to bury it because it is the entire premise of this newsletter and frankly I earned the right to mention it.

Instead of celebrating, though, I want to tell you about the backward P.

You know the one. That little symbol in Word that looks like someone tried to type a capital P and got distracted halfway through. It lives in the toolbar, next to a paint bucket and some mysterious squares. It turns on formatting marks, which means every space becomes a tiny dot, every paragraph ends with that backward P, and the entire document suddenly looks like the screenplay for a fever dream.

I clicked it on purpose. I am a professional. I wanted to see my paragraphs and my spaces, because I was in final-pass cleanup mode and I needed to make sure the structure was tight.

And then I looked at my book and saw little black squares next to every chapter heading.

Every. Single. One.

Not in Chapter 1. But starting in Chapter 2 and going all the way through to the end. Little black squares, sitting right next to my carefully crafted H2 titles, mocking me.

So I did what any reasonable self-publishing author does in the forty-five minutes between a 7am client and a 3pm client. I asked Claude to fix it.

"There are square bullets on all my H2 headers," I typed. "Starting from Chapter 2. Please fix."

Claude got to work. Claude is an extremely capable AI. Claude has helped me edit, format, restructure, and rescue this book more times than I can count. Claude looked at my file, very confidently identified some square bullets in Chapter 9 and Chapter 11, and announced it had fixed them.

I opened the file. Squares are still there.

"No," I said. "The squares are still there. They're on every header."

Claude apologized and dug deeper. Claude analyzed every list in the book. Claude examined font definitions, numbering schemes, abstract numbering IDs (which is a thing that exists, apparently, and now lives rent-free in my head). Claude proudly announced that it had converted all the square bullets to round bullets.

I opened the file. Squares are still there.

By round three I was getting that very specific feeling you get when you're trying to describe a pain to a doctor and they keep examining the wrong leg. I started typing in capital letters. "EVERY HEADER. STARTING CHAPTER 2. PLEASE TAKE THE BULLETS OFF THE HEADERS."

Claude tried again. Claude found exactly zero bullets on any heading. Claude was confused. I was confused. Somewhere a publishing industry professional was laughing at both of us.

Eventually I did what I should have done forty minutes earlier: I took a screenshot.

And Claude, bless it, looked at the screenshot and said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Oh. Those aren't bullets. Those are paragraph property markers. They only show up because you have formatting marks turned on. They will never print. They're invisible to your readers. They're only visible to you because of the backward P button."

The backward P. The button I had clicked on purpose, like a professional, because I wanted to see my paragraphs and my spaces. The button that was showing me, very faithfully, every single paragraph property in my book, including the ones that don't print.

I had spent forty minutes, across two client gaps, trying to remove a problem that did not exist outside of my own screen.

Here is the thing about technical editing. It is a term, by the way, that I did not know was a term until this book. And it is its own entire discipline. It is not proofreading. It is not copyediting. It is the deep, structural, what-style-is-this-paragraph-and-why-does-it-have-six-different-fonts work that turns a manuscript into something a printer can actually print.

I did most of it myself this time. I did it with Claude. I did it with Python scripts, unzipped .docx files, abstract numbering IDs, dash-killer utilities, and font audits.

And I learned, over four books now, that the reason I could do it myself is that I once paid an editor what felt like an obscene amount of money to teach me how a book is actually built. That investment, the one that hurt at the time, the one I almost talked myself out of, is the only reason I can sit here today, on this boat, with my tea, debugging paragraph property markers with an AI and laughing about it instead of crying.

If you are self-publishing and you are about to skip the editor: please don't.

You are not paying for someone to catch your typos. You are paying for someone who knows what the backward P does. Who knows the difference between a list item and a heading. Who can look at your manuscript and tell you, in plain English, that the thing you think is a bullet is actually a pagination indicator, and you should leave it alone and go to bed.

You can absolutely get to a place where you can do most of this yourself. I am there now. But I got there because someone showed me the road.

I got lucky. I had an editor who was generous with what she knew. I had the budget, that one time, to learn from her. And now I have an AI patient enough to fix the things I notice, even when the things I notice aren't really things at all.

So if you're finishing a book this season, or starting one, or stuck somewhere in the messy middle: invest in the editor. Invest in the learning. And maybe, just maybe, do not click the backward P button unless you really want to know what it does.

I'll be on the yacht. Actually, on the yacht. With my tea. And a manuscript with absolutely no square bullets on any of the headers.

Because there never were any to begin with.

Veronica writes about ecommerce, consulting, books, and the occasional Word document adventure at Coffee on a Yacht. The Shopify Agentic Commerce book is finished. Mostly. There's always one more pass.