Cleaning Up the Backlist (Patreon)

As I'm trying to re-invigorate my backlist, one of the things I'm noticing is how many of my older books have wonky formatting. Unavoidably—back then it was hand-code or bust, and then it was Sigil-and-handcode or bust, and if there was a paperback edition someone else was doing the layout and it looked much different from the e-edition.

This isn’t a huge deal, except that it meant that I could only ever make adjustments to the ebooks. I don’t have the software to tweak the paperback layouts (and in many cases, I don’t have any of the source files either).

Getting these older books into Vellum so I can re-issue them with typo and formatting fixes, and have a modern workflow that facilitates changes, is not exactly a priority, but it’s happening as I move some things into KU and fix up other things to re-launch or clean up their meta-data. Earthrise and its sequels have a tenth anniversary opportunity (some of you might have noticed the soft launch of book 1 earlier this year). I want to separate out the Kherishdar books into the chapbooks and the novels so that I can advertise Black Blossom as a Book 1 instead of the far more baffling and literary Aphorisms. And I’m hoping that KU will light a fire under some of the other flagging series, like the romance.

This is, like I said, not a priority – it’s finicky work, and I have to be at home to do it because Vellum a Mac-only product and the rest of my computers are Windows. But seeing people pick up the books as I put them in KU has made it more interesting to me to clean them up. The Godkindred Saga’s contract with Sofawolf lapsed six years ago (!), which frees me to make my own paperback edition… so I’ve been doing that and a hardcover, and cleaning up formatting errors and typos. I’d also like to put an author’s afterword and an art section in the back of the second book. I launched the Godkin serial in 2003 (!) and finished it in 2009—possibly the longest I’ve ever taken to finish a couple of novels!—and the Sofawolf edition’s from 2012. That makes it at very least a tenth anniversary opportunity, and, if I wanted to be pedantic, almost a 15-year one.

If I really wanted it to be more generally marketable, I’d shift all the present tense to past tense, but that would be so much work, and the ROI would be… nearly nonexistent. So it’s going to have to stay present tense, and darn the torpedoes. But I’ve cleaned up book 1 and generated a hardcover, which Amazon is now chewing on. Putting together a wraparound cover when what I painted originally was two separate panels… why did I do that? Author-me is appalled at Artist-me. Lol.

Anyway, when I’m done cleaning up Special Edition Book 2 and putting it up, I’ll let you know. But it’s pleasant to be tidying up these older books.