Rewriting history

I think it was Angela James of Carina Press who said one of the big things for an author to succeed is to consistently put out quality product and make no shortcuts. (I may be paraphrasing.) Carina is good like that - they run seminars for their authors to make sure they're on the right track.

The emphasis is very much on "quality product". It was heavily implied (or that is how I remembered it), that it's better to not publish something that's mediocre or simply not the best one can make it than to publish it and put off readers who'd otherwise happily devour the whole backlist.

In a way, every book/story by an author might be the "first point of contact", and the job of every first contact is to create a long-lasting relationship. I assume a tweet out of line is more easily forgiven than a weak book. The tweet was free, and Twitter is a casual environment anyway (which is why I've locked down my personal Twitter and created an "official one"), but a book costs money and people want their money's worth. Simple as that.

The longer I've been in the "game", the more I believe that's correct. When I started, I was just playing. You might say I was not taking things quite as seriously as I should have. Funnily enough, I think I've kinda grown up over the last roughly three or four years. I went from an easy-going real life job to the heart of European capitalism. From "oh, I want to be a literary agent when I grow up" to the "fixer" type at Riptide, and, last but not least, a publisher in my own right, crunching numbers and strategies. Before long, I might expand that business into the country of my birth. Writing might be what I was born to do, but in terms of my real life, financially, it's a side show. There's freedom in that. I *can* play without constantly looking at the bottomline.

However, increasingly, some of my books don't represent the standards I've set for myself. They weren't edited to the same standard, or should never have been published for other reasons. They might be deeply, madly, flawed. I don't want them to be the doors that people take into my work, because they are no longer part of the same house in a number of ways. I don't want my name attached, and I don't want people to pay money for them; it just feels wrong, deep in my guts.

I'm the first to say that top-rate work is worth its money, even if it's more than the $.99 people kick their novels out for to trigger the "hunter and gatherer" instinct in their readership. But I'm also the first to say that a book isn't worth its price because the contents are not top-rate. Sometimes it takes me a few years to see a story in that light. An author's attachment to a piece of work can be irrational and also take a while to weaken and crystallize. It's part of the process overall and the self-examination and self-judgment/evaluation that authors do. Well, at least I do. Pretty much constantly.

What does this mean in practice? I've already made moves to pull two backlist books/stories from circulation. I reserve the right to treat them as scrap metal and reuse the good bits (ideas, possibly a good turn of phrase here or there), but with my schedule, I don't expect that to happen any time soon. Over the next year or two, more stories will be pulled and rewritten and reedited in agreement with the other author involved. A series we killed might still happen under a different flag. We'll see. It's a wide-open space once the quality issue is resolved.

That's the miracle of e-publishing. An author has a totally different level of control over the backlist. We *can* take books from circulation and we *can* re-write and re-issue (or simply pull and lock in the attic).

I understand that some of you will want those stories, and I apologize for taking them away. You can always drop me a line and I can email them to you, or, since I'm being very widely pirated, you have my blessing to dig the "pulled" stories up from whatever source you feel comfortable using. Overall, though, I'm going to disassociate myself from that part of my work. What's worthwhile will be kept or rewritten, what's not worthwhile I hope will eventually forgotten and possibly forgiven.

I think the most important lesson out of this was that, indeed, putting out the best quality work you can is one of the biggest goals, and anything short of that simply shouldn't see the light of day.

I apologize for putting them out in the first place, and chalk this up to experience. Lesson learnt. It won't happen again. Let's move forward.