Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Frequently Asked Questions Series: Supplementary Questions

The funny thing we’ve found about having a comprehensive list of FAQs, is that there are still plenty of questions we haven’t answered.

Since we started running the FAQs series, this question has come up more than once:

“My book was previously available in an unedited form on my website/ blog/ personal discussion board OR it was previously self-published and available from Lulu or Amazon or from my website OR half of it was made available in installments at a readers’ website or on my blog so I could gauge reader interest OR I put a copy into print at Lulu but no one except my mother bought it. Does this still count as previously published?”

The answer, I’m afraid, is yes, it does still count. It doesn’t make any difference that the previous version was a messy first draft written ten years ago, which you’ve polished and improved since; or that no one ever joined your discussion board in order to read it; or that only your mother bought your self-published copy. The point is that it was previously available to the public, even if the public didn’t take any notice. If we contract it with Samhain, we have to mark it as “previously available”. And we don’t publish re-releases except from authors who are already with Samhain.

If you’re in this position, with a book you believe is really good and that Samhain would love, and that would sell well with us, then the best thing to do is write another book that’s really good and sell that to us, then approach your editor about the possibility of re-releasing your first book. We don’t guarantee anything, even so – editors contract re-releases strictly at their discretion and on a book-by-book basis.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to your book if all you did was put up a few excerpts of your work-in-progress on your website or blog, or if you posted up a chapter or two on a writers’ forum, or if you sent copies of the whole thing to your critique partners. Your critique partners are not the same as the public, and a few excerpts or chapters is not a significant enough portion of the book to count as “previously available”. Well, unless the excerpts/chapters came to 15,000 words and the book is only 20,000!

Please feel free to comment here, or email editor@samhainpublishing.com if you need clarification on any of these points.