Diane Duane gives backlist republishing a twist with e-book revision

I wrote earlier for TeleRead about an unexpected—and very welcome—sub-group of indie book: the backlist re-publication. One of the complaints people most frequently have about indie books is that it’s hard to tell the dross from the gold: So many self-published indie titles are one-man or one-woman shops, and people value the notion that with traditionally published books, a pair of eyes besides the author’s has seen the book, approved of it and polished it to its most refined state. Backlist re-publications are the best of both worlds: a publisher has seen it, approved it and polished it—and then the author got back the rights to it and republished it themselves as an indie e-book, over which they have full control.

Author Diane Duane adds an interesting twist to this phenomenon. Not only has she republished her popular So You Want to Be a Wizard series in DRM-free e-book formats from her own web store, but she has just launched a revised series for newcomers who haven’t bought the earlier release (or die-hard fans who want the ‘director’s cut’ version). As Diane explains on her blog, there were some issues with the legacy-published version.

Firstly, the series was begun at a time when the technology world was in a different state than it is now and it started looking a little stale. As she explains:

“Newer young readers have been telling me with increasing frequency that though they love the book, the early-1980′s feel of it put some of them off it to the point where it was a tossup whether they were ever going to read it at all. To say I felt their pain would be an understatement.”

As well, Duane found that the several-years gap in publication, resulting from some publisher shake-ups and other writerly delays, created inconsistencies in the character’s ages and in the internal timeline, especially when later books were compared to earlier ones. A polish was needed in order to maintain consistency across the series and polish everything to ensure a good reading experience.

Duane takes pains to point out that this is “emphatically not” a total re-write. She took pains “not to fix what wasn’t broken” and explains the changes as follows:

• The most important bit: adjustment of technology and background in the book(s) to reflect what’s routinely been part of young readers’ lives, starting in 2008
• Some minor editing of material that struck me while revising as clumsy or ineffective
• Some additional material (not vast amounts)
• Repair and reconstruction of what has for a long time been a very broken, inconsistent and frankly dysfunctional timeline

There are some interesting asides to this bullet list: The “additional material” Duane mentions consists mostly of additional scenes which came to her during a screenplay attempt for a proposed film. Duane also proposes some Twitter and Tumblr hashtags so those who want to discuss the book can do so easily; it’s always nice to see an author be smart about self-promotion!

This is an interesting twist on the backlist repub to me for several reasons. On the downside, the ‘nostalgia for paper books’ people may take issue with Duane’s tinkering; I can foresee reviews complaining that the e-book is not faithful to the paper copy that people remember reading as children. It’s one thing to find and replace ‘Apple Computer’ with something more contemporary, but ‘minor editing of material that struck me while revising as clumsy or ineffective’ is more of a slippery slope; in spite of Duane’s protestations that this isn’t a ‘rewrite,’ it’s really, really, not.

I can also foresee complaints from those who paid already for the ‘old’ version and now will have to pay again. I myself purchased this set as a bundle many moons ago when Duane was offering a promo code that made it too good a deal to pass up on. I have not had the chance to read it yet. If I get through Book 1 and I love it, I may commit to the upgrade and save the other books for when they too become available. But if the changes are minimal, I’m not sure I’ll want to pay again, or read again, just to get the bit of extra content. I think I can deal with a little bit of ’80s tech!

On the other hand, one of the blessings of the e-book revolution is that authors like Duane can seize the opportunity to reach a new audience … and why shouldn’t this audience have the benefit of Duane’s improved-with-age writer finesse, and the extra content, and the polished timeline? Why shouldn’t they have contemporary characters who speak to them and their generation?

I wonder if this will be a new trend in publishing. I am sure there are authors who look back on their earlier work sometimes and just cringe! I have some relics from my poetry phase as a teenager that are simply awful, but which at the time seemed excellent. How about someone like Nora Roberts, who has had over 100 books in which to polish her craft? Some of her early Harlequin tales have been re-published now that she’s a big name, but I bet there are others she chose to leave be. I remember reading an interview with author Dean Koontz where he talked about how hard it was to let go, because in an author’s mind, the book is never ‘finished,’ but at some point must be declared so because there it is in published paper now, and you certainly can’t go back and make changes once it’s out there like that! Duane is pushing the envelope here and saying that now … you can!