Old Books Wearing A New Dress

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am trying to reissue my earlier books (the rights to which I have had returned to  me) along with a couple of other books that I wrote but was not able to sell to a

"traditional" publisher. Reissuing the earlier published books hasn't been easy because they were written before I had a computer with 50,000 megabazillion bytes of memory and storage, back when files were saved on 5-inch floppies, the computer screen wasn't much bigger than my current phone, and the only mouse near my computer was the one my cat dragged inside from the backyard. Yes, I jumped on the personal computer bandwagon very early on and my finances kept me typing away on something that looked like it had been cobbled together in Steve Wozniak's garage for longer than I would have liked.

So what that means is that, aside from the finished books that were issued as mass market paperback originals by HarperCollins, the only copies I have of those early books is in a very old electronic form, saved on a variety of floppy disks, hard disks, CDs, and thumb drives as time and my computers progressed. They exist as collections of files written in some old word processing program, each book's chapters saved in individual files so that any one book requires the opening of some 20-30 different files. They are pre-copyedited files, so they don't match the finished products exactly, and the process of copying them from one type of storage medium to another over the years has resulted in several lost files and a few corrupted ones. And opening those files in modern-day Word software created some mystery stuff in several files that looked like a band of wild monkeys with a penchant for the wingdings font went on a typing spree.

I am painstakingly resurrecting, and in some cases recreating, those files (with some help) and trying to keep them as true to the original works as possible. Though I have to confess, I have made a few minor changes with regard to punctuation, grammar, and an occasional word change (you'd think I was getting paid by the exclamation point for Cold White Fury). And since I can't use the original cover images because of copyright issues, I am making each book a new dress to wear. I'm happy to say that I have the first two, Cold White Fury and Eyes of Night, finished and currently available as e-books. Their new dresses aren't fancy but I think they communicate the flavor of each book to some degree and I'm happy with them. I'm not sure how they would translate in print form but it's a moot point. I'm only issuing them as e-books for now since the original print versions can all be had used for prices that are too low for me to compete with. Those penny prices help me keep my ego in check.