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.