Indie

With the upcoming release of the Author’s Revised Edition so soon after the original version of The Gift of the Guardians was released, you may be wondering, “What gives? Why so soon?”

Well, it’s a bit of a story.

As you may know, I actually wrote the first draft of GotG over a decade ago, followed a few years later with about 95% of the first draft of The Blackguard’s Bond. I would revise and edit on my own, but life suddenly became very busy and I essentially just sat on the world. In the meantime, I fell in love, got married, had three kids, changed jobs, moved house, juggled financial weals and woes, lived through a global pandemic, wrote a whole other novel, half of another, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Anyhow, just over a year ago, I saw that a small publisher was accepting submissions and, kind of on a whim, I decided to take a chance.

Initially, I contacted them regarding the other, totally unrelated book that I was working on, but I was not particularly satisfied with it. They asked if I had anything else to submit, I mentioned GotG, and they asked me to send it along. A week later, they got back to me with the news that they wanted to work with me to publish it.

To be honest, I was hesitant, but rather than sit on the book any longer, I decided to go for it, particularly when I learned that I would maintain all of the rights to my work.

What follows is the unfortunately absurd tale of working with this publisher. From the full copy edit, that resulted in well over one hundred pages of line edits of my correcting their editing mistakes (mostly instances where they changed things that were grammatically correct, or missed painfully obvious typos–I’m pretty sure they just used an AI spelling/grammar check in a lot of areas), redesigning my own cover and sending it to them (though they didn’t actually use my original design), and various documents crafted by their publicity team (which were literally “cut and pastes” of things that I had written myself), it was all just a sloppy, hack job. As I said them, it was like I’d hired an electrician to wire my house, only to have to redo it all myself just to bring it up to code, and even then, it didn’t pass my own inspection.

Then there were the delays. If you follow my social media accounts, you can piece together a ridiculous timeline where I initially believed the book would be released anytime from the end of August until its eventual release date on December 28 (and, of course, most readers didn’t even get their copies until January 31).

So, around the beginning of December, I just got so fed up that I began planning a new edition–without this publisher. The final straw came when, after finishing the formatting for this edition, they attempted to dissuade me from releasing this “special edition” with a bunch of vague, wishy-washy hypotheticals, claiming, for instance, that it could confuse Amazon and other booksellers to have two books with the same name even if one was labeled “special edition” or the like. I also saw the publisher listed on certain websites as a predatory publisher and saw complaints similar to my own. Anyhow, it all worked out and I was able to make a clean break.

There are more details that I won’t bore you with, but I learned a lot over the past few months to the point where I can proudly say that I can effectively say the new edition (as well as the upcoming sequel, The Blackguard’s Bond) is the result of my own effort. Could there be flaws or mistakes? Perhaps, but at least they will be my mistakes and they will be mine to correct or own.

So that’s that. If you’re someone who’s been in a similar situation or is also looking to release a book and you think I can help, feel free to reach out. I’m no expert by any means, but I’ll certainly answer any questions I can.

Until next time,

Bello