Looking Forward and Back

“An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.” – Paul Valéry

Anyone who’s been keeping up with our news feeds will know that we recently re-released Matthew Munson’s Fall From Grace, our very first book. It felt appropriate, therefore, to talk a bit about why we felt the need to take a book from our distant past (hey, when you’re not five years old yet, four years is a long time!) and reversion it. After all, it would have been much easier to just leave it alone and work on newer, shinier projects.

The quote above notwithstanding, we know so much more than when we first began our foray into the publishing world. Over time, we’ve pulled our socks up regarding our design, editing, and formatting standards, to the point that we might as well be wearing said socks around our ears. The comparison between what we release now and what we released when we started is marked, but there’s no book of ours that we don’t have faith in.

Rebranding Inspired Quill made us look back at our catalogue and really think about what we could do better now that we have the experience and ability. So, our first book was our first port of call. Some other books have had ‘quiet’ re-edits that went into print as soon as they were sorted, but Fall From Grace had such development and so many additions that we couldn’t keep it under the same ISBN.  Given that we needed to register a whole new edition, it felt right to give it a wonderful new cover and treat it like a new release.

We don’t want to get the reputation that George Lucas or the innumerable Blade Runner releases have, but when we see something that needs improvement we are happy to spend a long time looking at it. It turns out you can get very nostalgic about a book you released four years ago, while thinking about what you would do differently now. The ultimate goal is to make sure it stays authentically the same story, but brings a new depth to the way it’s told. In this example, because Matthew had since written the sequel, Leap of Faith, it gave him a chance to revisit ideas that had been developing through that journey as well.

It’s easier for us to do re-edits as we need them because we use print on demand technology; we don’t have huge stocks of previous editions sitting on store shelves that we have to recall or wait to disappear. So that’s a nice bonus to our efficiency. But we’re conscious of not sending out too many multiple edits, because not only does it impact our work on new titles, but we don’t want our readers to feel cheated by handfuls of new editions popping up every year, each with very minor changes. Fall From Grace, though, has an extra 21,000 words or so, which definitely warrants some attention if you were a fan of the original! And don’t worry about having to keep buying your favourite book over and over – we’ll keep everyone abreast of any new editions.

So, we promise not to kill any characters without you looking. But unfortunately, that means we can’t resurrect them, either!

It’s up to you to pester your author of choice for sequels or prequels.

I often joke that the only way I could step foot into the publishing industry is by creating my own publishing house. In the last almost-decade, Inspired Quill – along with the people involved – has been a huge part of my life. I have given numerous talks at conventions, festivals and online tele-summits about non-tokenistic diversity in fiction publishing, and how writers can break into the publishing industry in general.