The Surprising Change I Made With This Book That No One Saw Coming
This Just In: Launching a second edition wasn’t as simple as I thought it’d be, and I learned some lessons along the way.
It’s been two weeks since I published the second edition of Write Now. Going into the rewriting process, I thought it’d be simple — edit the whole thing, rewrite the applicable sections, and republish. Boy, was I wrong.
The rewriting was actually the easiest part. It only took a few months and was no different than writing anything else. I went a chapter at a time, ripping the entire thing out and reworking everything from the ground up. The problems began when I started replacing the rewritten text in the book.
For the first edition, I hired a typesetter. To save a little money and learn how to typeset myself, I wanted to control the process. I thought it’d be easy. It led down an entire rabbit hole that ended in typesetting not one but two versions of the book — one for print and one for digital.
You all, typesetting is difficult! There isn’t a great tool out there for nonfiction typesetting. Vellum is fantastic for ebooks, but its limitations in print are substantial — especially if you want to include worksheets, as I did. I likely could have saved some time and frustration by shelling out for a professional instead of trying to do it myself.
I learned that simply dropping the words into Apple Pages or Vellum led to SO MANY unexpected — and, frankly, unexplained — mistakes that somehow Grammarly and ProWritingAid missed. For example, no tool could tell me I had typos or misspellings in a chapter heading. Huh?!
Anyway, these issues all came to light when I sent out Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) of what I thought was a polished and print-ready book — it wasn’t.
There’s an entire chapter in my book about the benefits of multiple revision rounds and hiring a high-quality editor. Reader, this is one of those times that I absolutely should have listened to myself. Instead, I had built the idea that the first edition had been professionally edited, and I was simply making some changes; naturally, the second edition would be fine without a professional.
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