So, between bouts of planning on Isolate, I’ve been doing a round of revisions to Nolander. Mostly I’ve been tightening up sentences and fixing details, but I am making a couple larger changes. It’s just about done. I’m hoping to send it to my formatter in the next couple days.
First, I’m adding some additional material to the end of the last chapter (the last one with Beth, before the epilogue), to give the story a bit more of a concluding feel. I haven’t deleted anything from the old ending; rather, I’ve added an additional scene. If there was one consistent complaint about Nolander in readers’ reviews, it was that the book “just stops.” I think that’s an accurate criticism and that I can make it better without changing the story.
The other larger change I’m making is to shift the Ghosteater point-of-view chapters into straight third-person. Originally, I had Beth (a first-person narrator) becoming a third-person narrator in those chapters. Some readers have thought that approach was sort of cool, while others have found weird and distracting. Since I expanded the POV characters beyond just Beth and Ghosteater in Solatium, I decided it was better to just use straight third-person for all of them. This change doesn’t alter what happens in the Ghosteater chapters. It just removes a layer of filtering between Ghosteater an the reader. For instance …
From the silence, Ghosteater watched me kiss Graham. He could smell our arousal. It brought back ancient memories from the time …
… becomes …
From the silence, Ghosteater watched the male and female humans kiss. He could smell their arousal. It brought back ancient memories from the time …
This may strike some readers as a less interesting approach, but I think most will find it more transparent and less confusing. After all, Nolander never deals with the question of why Beth might be able to see events through Ghosteater’s POV.
Examples of the kinds of details I’ve changed: since publishing Nolander in 2012, I’ve read that many paleontologists now believe somewhere between many and all dinosaurs had feathers, so I’ve given the minis of Octoworld plumage. They’re theropods — part of the clade that includes modern birds — and almost certainly would’ve been feathered. Also, I’ve removed most discussion of “castes” to cut down on the amount of info being tossed at Beth early in the book. Castes are still part of the Emanations world, but I realized Beth doesn’t really need to know about them in detail early on. There are a number of small changes along these lines — correcting, tightening.
I’m delighted to be able to do this kind of work. The success of the Emanations series really depends on the quality of its first book. Nolander is the “funnel” into the series — it’s the free book that people can pick up to see if my writing appeals. So it needs to be as strong as it can be. The ability to make improvements to an existing book is one of the great strengths of indie publishing. It must be so frustrating for traditionally published authors to find a typo or a plot hole in a book — or just to realize that one of their earlier books could be stronger — and never be able to fix it.
So, why am I explaining all this? I’m trying to decide whether to ask Amazon to offer an update of the book to all existing owners. When Amazon offers an update, owners of the book who check their libraries in the cloud will see an option either to keep the version of the book they already have or to download the update, which would copy over and replace the old version. (Amazon will not reach into your library and change stuff without your permission, except in very unusual cases.) Updates are pretty common, but usually they don’t include substantive changes to the book. Some readers might be displeased to find that they book they remember reading has been altered.
The other option is just to put mobi and epub files of the new version up here, on my website, so that people can download the new “edition” if they want. They could sideload it to their Kindles and keep it alongside the older version they purchased on Amazon. This would also allow non-Amazon users to get the new version (I don’t know that the other ebook retailers have any equivalent to Amazon’s update feature). This is the direction I’m leaning.
Thoughts? Reactions? Suggestions?