Republishing Books

Being honest with yourself about your own books…

Today, some friends suggested that I should consider republishing books from my flagship series Behind The Smile. However, I find it almost impossible to contemplate.

That is a huge concept to get my head around.

It has produced most of my sales for the last decade!

Republishing

Their suggestion was made because we were talking about my book sales, which have been slowing down for about a year. So, they thought that it might be worth rebranding, and then republishing the books in this series.

I am not completely sure what they mean by that. I think that it probably has to do with altering the titles, the blurbs and the genre, and then encapsulating all that in new covers in order to make the series more selectable by a new readership. In fact, a large part of this proposed rebranding would be to create new covers to reflect the new genre.

On the face of it, I like the idea. But when you dig down into what republishing books entails, it involves a massive amount of time and work. After all, I have spent ten years building up a readership for the series as it is and looks now. It is recognisable as it is.

If I change everything, I will have to unpublish the existing series of seven volumes, thereby losing all possible sales on them, and republish the new ones… Effectively starting from scratch again.

Rebranding Books

It is a big gamble.

In an attempt to find out more, I did a search on ‘rebranding books’, and came up with several very interesting articles. These authors didn’t actually go the whole hog of ‘rebranding and then republishing books, but they talked about cover make-overs.

One article was about the legendary Dune by Frank Herbert. I think I remember rightly that it was first published in 1965. Anyway, the interesting bit is that the whole series of five books has had completely new covers every five years ever since! 

Rewriting?

Look the article up, it opened my eyes. I have always written and published books, slapped a cover on them and that was it. However, apparently cover design is also prey to fashion, which is very difficult to pin down, as we all know – look at clothing!

So, I will start with new covers, but I will keep rebranding and republishing open in my mind as an option.

What do readers think of this marketing tactic, and  have any authors who come here any experience with rebranding and/or republishing books?

Regards,

Owen

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