I was involved in a brief discussion this morning about whether one should revise an ebook after publication.
My answer was: Of course. One of the supposed massive advantages of a digital publication medium is that you can update ebooks. At least one ebook that I purchased some time ago, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur by Guy Kawasaki, was updated a few years after its initial publication. I was notified by Amazon that the book had been updated and asked if I wanted to download the update. I said Yes, and received the updated version.
The big question for fiction authors is: when should you update a book and what level of update should you consider.
It is worth noting that in the past, fiction authors have revised books. John Fowles revised the ending to The Magus and issued a new Revised Edition of the book. In the introduction to the Revised Edition, he explained that he never liked the original ending, but the book was published in a hurry, after the unexpected success of The Collector, which had been adapted into a play by the BBC to critical acclaim, led to his publishing company ringing him up and desperately demanding “John, do you have another novel we can rush out quickly? You’re hot in the marketplace, if you get our drift.” Fowles had in fact written The Magus as his first novel over a period of close to 10 years in the 1950s, but it had consistently been rejected by dozens of publishers, including the publisher that ended up publishing The Collector. Amazing what a hit novel does to publishing company attitudes. Suddenly the long novel that they had unceremoniously rejected was a New Hit, and please can you send in the proofs like, er, yesterday?
By the way, there is an excellent quote from Fowles himself in his obituary in the The Independent. He talked of novels being “brewed”:
It means you write the idea or the main part of it in a given period. Then you have to let it lie, like a good beer, and it gathers strength, gathers flavour, all the rest of it, over time.
My personal position is that I would limit updates of fiction books to minor corrections to items like flow, continuity and consistency. If, for example, a character in a book starts a scene wearing yellow flannel underwear, but suddenly in the middle of the scene, they are wearing red flannel underwear, with no intervening event, that is clearly a continuity issue that ought to be fixed. (Science fiction readers are horribly good at finding those kinds of inconsistencies in detail, plot and flow).
On the other hand, if somebody writes to me and says “Rupert, I don’t think much of the Books of Loukas. How about you re-write it like this? <lengthy explanation follows>, the answer will be a flat No. Remember that the reason that Book of Loukas was published is because it was complete, I abandoned it. I’m not going back to re-work it. I’m on to something else.
Ditto my good friend Belem Knight. If somebody writes in to correct a consistency error in his novella Brian Bigwood and the Shagging Stewardesses, then he may correct it. If they want him to re-write the novella, Nope.
NOTE: Books of Loukas is in work and the first book will be published in 2021. Brian Bigwood and the Shagging Stewardesses is an entirely fictional book idea. Although as I look over at Belem, he clearly thinks that the title has a nice ring to it, and I can already see him stroking his chin and imagining Chapter 1…