Catherine Robertson
“Last year, nearly ten years after publishing my first book, I revisited my first three novels, editing and updating them to self-publish as e-books…
Before my first novel The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid was released, my publisher and I agreed that they would have rights to publish all formats of the book in New Zealand and Australia, as well as worldwide English-language e-book rights. But we also agreed that if I got a better offer in another market, they would relinquish e-rights for that market. This same arrangement was agreed to for my next two novels The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence and The Misplaced Affections of Charlotte Fforbes.
The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid did very well and I began working with an agent to sell international rights to those first three books. Over the years, we sold Italian and German language versions and we got close to securing English language rights deals in the United Kingdom and the United States but, in the end, no banana!
At the same time, I watched the performance of my books on e-platforms and realised that the prices the digital platforms were setting were connected to the recommended retail price of the printed books. That meant my e-books were priced at around $15 but the top price that regular e-book customers were prepared to pay for any e-book was $4.99 – I didn’t sell a lot of e-books.
As my early novels hadn’t really had much of a chance on e-platforms, I wanted to see what new readers I could attract by self-publishing, so, I started conversations again with my publisher. We came to an agreement and last year updated my contracts for all three novels; they kept the rights for New Zealand and Australia and returned worldwide rights for both e-books and print to me.
I decided to edit and update all three novels and really enjoyed re-visiting them. After so long, it felt weirdly like they were written by someone else. The only one I made any major changes to though was The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence, as I was no longer happy with the development of one of the main characters. I also decided to release a previously unpublished novella that rounds off the series, The Midlife Misgivings of Edward Marsh.
Next, my son, Callum, created beautiful new cover art and I signed up for mentoring sessions with highly successful, self-published, New Zealand author Steff Green. All four books are now up on Amazon through Kindle Unlimited and in the New Year, I’ll go wide and release the books through other e-book platforms.
While ten years have passed since my first book was published, the rights in my early work hold a lot of value for me and there is still real potential for me to earn from the success of these novels. If I’d known more about how e-publishing worked, I would have kept my worldwide rights at the outset. Self-publishing these e-books has taken focus and time but it also has given me control over the end-to-end process. In addition, it gives me the ability to tweak my approach if it’s not working – and I think this has the potential to teach an author so much about the things readers respond to.”
Catherine Robertson is a novelist, book reviewer and co-owner of GOOD BOOKS bookshop.