Remember how I like to find things out for myself?
Well, when it came to relaunching my books and answering the question of whether to go back and edit them or just update covers and descriptions and hope for the best…
And when everyone said never go back and re-edit your books1...
I didn't listen. I went back and re-edited my books.
Thankfully, indie publishing gives me the freedom and control to make this maybe-not-the-soundest-business-decision-ever2.
Why I didn't listen to the experts
First and foremost, I love these books and I love Lila and Gabe's story, both what I've written so far in The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters series, Books 1-4, and what I have planned through Book 6 and possibly through a Book 12(!).
I believe in them.
And so I didn't want to abandon them.
Especially since I'm not sure I gave them the best chance, both in terms of my marketing from about 2017-2020 and in terms of putting out the best Book 1.
(Note: I put out the best Book 1 I could at the time, but now, six years after finishing that book, I'm a much better writer. In my opinion anyway. And perhaps unsurprisingly, lol.)
So, I wanted to give this romantic YA urban fantasy series the best chance it could have to succeed.
That meant updating Book 1 and relaunching all the books, using all the tips and tricks for both writing craft and marketing that I learned in the last ten years of chasing this author career and writing eight Eversfield Academy novelettes, novellas, and novels and more short stories and other novelettes than I care to count.
Secondly, I have a tendency to need to learn things for myself. This is good and bad3.
On one hand, I'm not afraid to strike out on my own path, which is a strength nowadays in indie publishing when there are so bloodsucking4 many options.
On the other hand, I tend to see expert advice and go "meh, that's not for me" and then ignore something that I probably should have listened to.
That brings me to…
Why this was the write* decision for me
*pun time!
Which can also be called "determined."
As such, I'm highly internally motivated and don't need external motivations for the most part. (Ex: When I unpublished my books in preparation for the big relaunch and stopped having those yummy, yummy book sales to motivate me, and I kept editing just fine.)
Secondly, I'm a Type 1 Enneagram, also known as the perfectionist. That means I love, adore, relish creating a book to the best of my ability.
So, when you put those two things together—the facts that I’m internally motivated and a perfectionist—re-editing my books to get them juuuuuust right is right up my alley.
One might say perfectly so, lol.
Lastly, one of my basic rules for my life is to live without regrets as much as possible.
With how much I love the books of The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters, I would have regretted abandoning them without giving everything I had to make them financially successful5,6,7.
So here I am, giving everything I have to make these books financially successful.
If they still don't end up making a profit, that's okay. I won't regret having tried to make them financially successful, and I would have always wondered what could have been if I didn’t.
But would I do this again?
Absolutely not. 😂
This has been some of the hardest work I've ever done.
And I have two degrees in biomedical engineering!
The edits have been painstaking and taken at least twice as long as I would have been okay with going into this.
And probably four times as long as I originally thought they would take8.
While I am highly internally motivated, it's been rough, working on books that no one is reading for years.
And yes, this was almost certainly a bad business decision.
Which, to be fair, everyone said it was.
That said, I can't guarantee that I won't do this again. Just scroll up to read all the reasons why I did it.
And hey, if these books end up making a profit and I get to write the series out to my preferred ending, that would be ah-mazing!
Would I recommend another author go back and re-edit all their books?
This is the perfect (and infuriating) "your mileage may vary" answer.
As you can see from this article, I have many reasons for why I did it.
But I would be very, very, very wary of doing it again.
So, if you're thinking about re-editing a bunch of books in a series (or even going back to Book 1 only and tearing it apart, hoping its changes don't change the other books too much9), I would think long and hard about it.
It doesn't mean you can't do it, just that you should be critical of the decision.
And know that it is likely not the best business decision.
And that's okay! It's important to pay the bills, but it's also important to have fun and follow your heart.
It's up to you to find that balance for you and your specific situation.
And for me—this time at least—the answer was to go back and re-edit those books.
Time will tell if it will pay off.
And maybe it already has, in that I've learned a ton about writing in the process and I've had great fun weaving all my books even closer together.
Happy reading as always,
Betsy
The epic list of side notes and digressions:
- I don't have any direct references for this advice, but some of the people and podcasts I follow (and recommend you follow if you're an aspiring author!) are: H. Claire Taylor, The Self Publishing Show podcast, and The Sell More Books Show podcast. Can you tell that I like podcasts? 😝 (Side note: As of November 2024, The Self Publishing Show podcast is no longer weekly, but there are tons of helpful past episodes that are still relevant as of November 2024. In my opinion anyway.)
- For more on why I love indie publishing (spoilers: it's a mix of freedom and control that only indie publishing can give), see my Why I love indie publishing post.
- For pretty much all personality traits, my view is that they can all be good or bad. On one hand, you can be stubborn, but on the other hand, you can be determined. It's all in moderation, folks.
- This is curse word my Nighstalkers use in The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters series, and so of course I use it now. You can check out a bunch of the curse words used in The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters romantic young adult urban fantasy series here.
- Yes, yes, I could have started a new series, and then returned to these at a later date. But I felt like the fans of this series deserve a decent endpoint, which means continuing it at least through Book 6. And I still may end things around Book 6 and then maybe return to them later, to complete my ideal ending.
- Within limits, of course. I'm not going to bankrupt my family or go into debt trying to force these books to be popular.
- Here's a quick reminder of why I use "financially" successful here. To me, a book's success (or not) doesn't depend on how much money it makes, but rather on whether I love what I created. Thus, as long as I love my creation, I'm successful and so is the book. That said, I do have to be a little practical, in that I want my books to pay the bills for, you know, being an actual living human. Hence, I separate a book's generic success from its financial success.
- Yes, I was probably lying to myself about how long the edits would take when I chose this path. And also, I don't know that this is the exact right number for this comparison. But I don't want to go back and calculate how much longer the relaunch edits have taken versus how long I kinda-sorta thought they would take. And so I won't, lol.
- My edits on Book 1 did impact later books in the series (and earlier ones in the prequel series of standalone books of Eversfield Academy: Vampire Origins), but I run a very linear series, and my perfectionist nature meant that I found great joy in taking the opportunity to strengthen the other books while I was adjusting them for the new Book 1 anyway. Which, of course, cost more time.