THIS IS NOT THE 'HOW-TO' BLOG POST
Before I get to how to do a 2nd edition of your book, the preliminary questions you need to answer are:
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- Should you do a 2nd edition of one book or the entire series?
- Why should you do it?
- Is it worth it?
- Should you just accept the earlier book as not your best and move on?
- What will I get out of it?
- Isn't it easier to just move on and write a better book or book series?
The reason I'm sharing my experience in publishing a second edition of Darius - A Vampire Story is because it seemed overwhelming when I was thinking about doing it. It turned out to be one of the hardest decisions I had to make in my writing career, and I had doubts the entire way through the process.
However, in looking back, the decision itself -- answering all the above questions and deciding to move forward with it -- was the hardest part. I assumed reworking the book would have been the hardest part, but it wasn't. But in the end, it was much easier than I thought.
SHOULD I DO A 2ND EDITION OR NOT?
Although I decided to move forward with doing the 2nd edition, I was unclear even as I went about it.
I read Chris Fox's book Relaunch Your Novel and he had great advice. He got my wheels turning and he asked the right questions about why you would want to relaunch your novel.
These questions were what triggered the process. There are lots of reasons why you would want to relaunch a book. It's important to know what your particular reasons are because although it is not hard, there are a lot of steps to it, some costs, and you will need a sense of mission to spur you on in the process.
THE BIGGEST TEMPTATION:
The biggest temptation along the way was to take the attitude that everyone's early books aren't that great, so let go and just move on. This would have certainly given me a quick fix. But in my case, I just couldn't leave the book alone knowing that I could probably polish it up a bit before moving on. So for me, even though it was tempting to just let go and move on, I decided I want to fix the book -- and maybe even the entire series -- but I wasn't sure whether I just wanted to do a re-edit or to change the storyline, etc.
ONE STEP AT A TIME:
I decided that I wanted to just fix the first book in the series because it had the lowest ratings. The second reason I wanted to make the effort with fixing the book is that I have now finished the series with the 5th book, and now that I know how the story ends, I wanted to put a little foreshadowing into the book while I was buffing it up.
I let go of the idea of redoing the entire series because I knew I could be happy to just fix the one book, so that's one reason I proceeded forward.
WHAT WILL I GET OUT OF IT?
This was the one question that led me down the road of choosing to write a 2nd edition: What will I get out of it? The answer was and is: I knew if I fixed Book 1 that then I would be able to let go of the entire series and move on. I still like the stories and the series itself. It's not my most popular book series, but I still like it. So fixing the first book was important to me in terms of 'my body of work'. I knew I had more experience and I could improve the book, even if it was just adding some foreshadowing or improving on the prose.
The first decision I made was to pull the novel into Scrivener, divide it up into chapters and read through it. The next question I had to answer was: Do you want to change the plotline? Or do you want to add some foreshadowing and just improve the prose?
To be honest: I wasn't sure but I knew reading the book chapter by chapter would lead me to the answer. So I pulled the manuscript into Scrivener. The first question I needed to answer was: What do you want to change? Will this just be a normal update or will it be an actual second edition.
In the next installment of this blog series, I will go into what happened when I went into Scrivener and began the read through.
If you, however, are self-publishing and are planning to do your own marketing, giving away your book, especially when you are just breaking in as an author is crucial. Once you decide to give away your books, you will need a PDF document and an ePub document.
As I'm sure you already know, you can create a PDF inside Word, so that's not a problem. However, you will need a conversion program to create the ePub. I use the program called Convertio.co. This is a paid plan, and it comes to $9.00 a month at the time of this blog. If you only have one book, you can sign up for one month and then stop the service -- but check to make sure that's an option before you do that.
Sigil is a program for making or polishing up ePubs after conversion. I always had to get rid of a lot of crazy codes in the ePub so that's why I used Sigil throughout the years.
Yes, the recipe. I just finished planning a Private Advanced Reader Campaign and although it's not hard, it does require several steps and knowing what order you need to do each step is important. If you do them in the proper order, it will be an easy process.
For any Advanced Reader Campaign, I would suggest you add a disclaimer that it is an advanced copy, a watermark, and a link to fill out a questionnaire about what the reader thought about the book.
You will need to create the questionnaire for the readers to fill out. Now, if you don't have a website where you can create a form, you can use a google forms or you can ask the readers to send an email with feedback about the book to your email. I have found the forms get more interaction.
And lastly, you will need graphics to post on your website or social media.
The one main reason I have right now is that I want to avoid offering this to the general public because I am not sure if the book, even though it is edited, is in its final form.
In order to offer a limited ARC copy, I will use my newsletter list, which is really my reader list, and my website. I will limit the invitations to these two places.
I usually bring these epubs into Sigil, a program to create and/or edit ePubs in order to make some global changes and/or clean up the extra codes it may bring inside. I will have a video on this one.Create a PDF from your docx file. Once you have the epub and PDF, you are ready to upload to KDP and test it. I will cover this in one of the videos.Upload the PDF and the ePub up to google drive and copy the links; you will need them later.
The next steps are done with my website. They have to do with pages and forms. So if you don’t have a website, then you can use google forms or whatever system you presently use to get signups. I use Mailerlite and could have set this up through them, but I want to receive the emails and names myself so I can keep a list of who the ARC readers are so I can ask them for a review when the book is ultimately published.
The first thing I noticed is that the story needs to be contained or confined to a shorter version than a novel. This means that you won’t have the same space to build the characters.
There are templates all over the internet for story crafting, but they all seem to follow the hero’s journey, which I find doesn’t work for mystery books. At least I was never able to make them work for me.
