When the rights to older books revert, republishing them is an obvious choice. I want to have all of my content available to readers, and I want it out there earning revenue. It is a bit of a challenge, though, deciding how much to revise them. The older the book, the more things I want to change! I always want to use everything I’ve learned since first writing the book, and make it a stronger telling of the story. That would also make the story more appealing to readers finding it for the first time. On the other hand, there are people who love these books just as they are and would be disappointed by big revisions.

A balance must be struck. After revising many books for republication, here’s what I do.

First, any spelling errors and grammatical issues must be corrected. There tend to be more of these with my older books than were actually in the book itself, as I’ve had these books scanned to create a new digital file. The original digital files were on floppy disks that can’t be read anymore, in software that is no longer supported. Digital scans create a lot of goofiness. The OCD scanner can misinterpret things, seeing rn as m, for example – corn becomes com this way. That’s a tricky one to find. Hyphens are seen as fixed details when they’re really just line breaks. Fonts are squished or expanded to make the page count come out right. Obviously, all of that needs to be fixed.

In terms of the content itself, I try to be strategic – regardless of how much I’d just like to rewrite the entire story again. I used to head-hop, for example, which means changing point of view within a scene. I don’t do that anymore and it bothers me now. So, if there are multiple points of view in a scene, I will eliminate the one that takes less space.

I often delete adverbs – I used to really like them. I also simplify sentences. I used to like long sentences with subordinate clauses. Now I break them in two. I may change the scene breaks to improve the flow of the book, and in so doing, may add hooks on the last paragraph in the scene, so that it flows more automatically to the next scene.

In my older medievals, I used a formal structure in dialogue that I thought sounded archaic. (“Glad I am to have learned of your recovery.”) Now it sounds as if every character is Yoda, so I’ve been taking that out. (“I am glad to learn of your recovery.”)

I may make corrections to the background details, based on research into social history I’ve done since writing that particular book. I also update or change individual words that sound modern to me now.

I have, on occasion, modified the story slightly to give the characters more agency – I prefer when the happy ending is achieved because they made a choice and acted, not because they got lucky – or I sometimes revise so that a sympathetic character lives, instead of dying tragically for no good reason. (That’s real life, not fiction.)

Sometimes I change the title, or add series information to the book that didn’t exist in its metadata before. When I change the title, I always note the previous title in the description, so you don’t inadvertently buy a book you’ve read already, mistaking it for a different work. You can see how that looks on One Knight Enchanted – the same note mentions that the ending of the book has been changed.

I think that in making changes and modifications like this, which don’t affect the essential structure of the story, both established readers (with long memories) and newer readers may enjoy the new editions.

The rights to all of my books have reverted to me, and most of them have been revised and republished. This summer, I’m working on adding the stragglers into my list of publications. First up will be new editions of The Rose Trilogy, which will have new series information and new titles along with their new covers. After that, I’m planning to republish the two books in The Moorish Series.

There will be only two books outstanding at that point. Book 3 of the Unicorn Trilogy, Unicorn Vengeance, hasn’t been republished and might not be. Because I modified the ending of Pearl Beyond Price, I like that as a series finale.

The last outstanding book is My Lady’s Desire, which I plan to republish as the last book in my Rogues & Angels series. The hero, Yves, is the younger brother of Annelise (the heroine of One Knight Enchanted) and Quinn (the hero of One Knight’s Return) and they will have a family reunion in that book.