It’s pretty common for movies to be re-released as ‘remastered editions’ or ‘directors cuts’. It’s less common for it to happen with books. And I’m not sure why that’s the case.
I started publishing about ten years ago, and I have learned a lot during that time. I have gotten better at writing and publishing and I want my work to reflect that.
A lot of the stories that I have published haven’t sold particularly well, despite getting some reasonable reviews. Part of the reason for that is that I have done no promotion. One reason I haven’t done is because I don’t feel confident in the books themselves. I wouldn’t say there is anything wrong with them, although I suspect they read amateurishly and don’t represent the best I can produce.
Which is where these remastered editions come in. I am going through all my backlist titles and re-editing them and making them as good as I can today. Once I have done that, I think I’m going to feel a lot happier promoting them to people.
Avoiding the Star Wars Problem
I was born in 1983, just before Return of the Jedi came out. There were no new films produced until I was almost an adult. Star Wars was something I was always aware of and when the original films were re-released, I saw them at the cinema. Star Wars was cultural background, so I heard all about the problems with the new editions.
Although my backlist is not Star Wars, I am keen to avoid changing things that change the stories. I don’t want to have a Greedo shooting first moment. So I am limiting the changes I can make.
These remasters are a spit and polish. They are an attempt to improve what is already there and make it as good as they should have been in the first place. That’s why I’m looking at grammar and spelling and making things clearer where they aren’t already clear.
This is also a question of time. I believe that the best thing I can do to get more readers is to write new stories, and that is what I am using most of my time for. But if those readers want to delve into what I have written previously, I want them to enjoy the experience, not give up and say that my past work is terrible.
The First Remaster
I have gone back and forth on what the first release should be. If I was further ahead, then I would go with the zombie books, which are by far the most popular titles. I have, in fact, already remastered the first book in the trilogy and started work on the second. But then we have Halloween coming up and I thought it would be good to have something ready for that.
The first remaster that I will release is Abomination. It’s a haunted house story. It’s a standalone title. My plan is to have it ready and published in October so that I can promote it for the spooky season.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago during the whole thing with Reddit changing the API rules. I never posted it and it’s not relevant anymore, but it made me think about the digital tools I use.
It’s not as if anyone ever thought that Reddit was a not-for-profit, but the sudden change of rules still caught everyone off guard. In the weeks since things have settled down and if you go on Reddit now, it’s like nothing ever happened. I don’t know if you can say the same about Twitter / X because I haven’t been back since I deleted my account.
The thing is, these places are social media platforms and there is an unspoken agreement that we give them content in exchange for a mechanism which allows other people to view that content. I’m kind of uncomfortable with that agreement for several reasons, but it is what it is. We accept they are going to make money from our content, so the fact that Reddit and X have done so, in a way that has upset a bunch of people, is annoying but understandable.
What about places that aren’t social media platforms?
This is the one that really gets me because there are a lot of places online where we put important things on the assumption that it is going to remain there. Or that we are going to be able to continue accessing it. I used to do it and sometimes I still do. But it makes me uncomfortable because they can change the rules at any moment.
It’s not entirely clear to me what the answer is to any of this. I try to do as much of my writing as I can in plain text and use local storage. I started this blog back up again. I am still looking at ways I can manage the content I create and keep ownership of it. If the changes at Reddit have shown us anything, it is that building a business on someone else’s platform is precarious.
It’s commonly accepted that the first draft of every story is going to be rough. There will be spelling mistakes, grammar errors and, even if you are a planner like me, there will be plot-holes you hadn’t considered. It’s something you know going in, but you know you will get a chance to work on it later to fix those things.
If you thought you had one chance to write the story, only a single pass to make it perfect, that would be scary. Aiming for that level of perfection would make it hard to even start.
So why do I let it stop me with other things? Why have I waited until now to start blogging again? Because I wanted everything to be perfect before I started. I didn’t consider the fact I would learn much faster by writing and publishing these blog posts than I would by just thinking about it.
The same was true of publishing. I haven’t done much recently for reasons that I will write about one day, but ten years ago I just started putting things out, trying different platforms and methods and I learned a lot in the process. But I never felt like I could do the same with the other aspects of publishing and marketing and all that fun business stuff.
I think that for me, part of it was worrying that people wouldn’t forget. That I would make one mistake and never get a second chance. Which is pretty crazy. I’m a normal person, I’m not going to do anything that would upset people. Realistically it’s far more likely that no one would notice what I’m doing.
Which is why I’m trying this new thing. Considering everything a draft that I can work on and improve and get better at. It’s going to be better for me to try stuff and fail than to never try because I don’t think it’s going to be perfect.
I didn’t really expect it to happen like this. If I’m honest, I never really expected it to happen at all. It has always been my ambition to be a full-time writer, but it always seemed just out of reach. Something that I was always working towards but never seeming to get closer to. Then one day it happened but, like I said, not the way I expected it to.
At the end of May I was made redundant from my day job. It was a shock. I had been with the company for something like 14 years. There’s no hard feelings though. I don’t think it was ever the right fit for me. It was something to do while I waited for my writing career to take off. It was convenient because I could work from home and it paid reasonably well.
Then it was gone and I had to figure out what to do next. I considered various options but none of them was right. I didn’t want to have to go into an office. I didn’t want to have to get another “job”. And all the while I was thinking and looking into what I was going to do to make money, I was continuing to write fiction, as I have always done.
One day, I was talking to Tamzin and she asked me if I thought I could make money from fiction. I’m already making money, I told her, just nowhere near enough. But, if I could focus on that and start doing the “business” side of things as well, there was a pretty good chance that I could make more. So she told me to do it. And here I am.
I’m not starting from scratch. I have a decent back catalogue to work with. I have been publishing for more than ten years. The main problem is that I haven’t actually told anyone about it. There are people who don’t even know I am a writer.
Since that conversation I have spent a while learning more about the business side of publishing and working out what I need to do. This is an ongoing process. Nothing is set in stone. But I have ideas and I am starting to build up the things that I need. You will be hearing a lot more from me.
Cat Update
Pixel and Cody are doing well and getting more confident. Pixel has let us stroke her and was really interested in the smells on my trainers when I came back from running.
