I saw a comment (on Quora) by a prominent fantasy author saying that self-publishing could be a mistake because the writer was putting their first million possibly-lousy words out in the world for anyone to see.
That is a valid point. The flip side is that many (if not most) of us who self-publish are so little-seen that it’s hard to know whether anyone thinks our stuff is lousy.
Even those of us who have beta readers, writers’ groups, or editors never really know what The Audience thinks until/unless we start getting reviews, and even then only if we spend a self-destructive amount of time scouring the internet for all available reviews.
Also, as I’ve said before, with self-publishing there is nearly infinite opportunity to improve the work. I’ve revised and re-published almost every one of my titles. Even if the change is something as simple as moving the ‘by the same author’ section from front matter to end matter, I’m in there pretty often tweaking and polishing.
Sometimes, wholly rewriting. That has happened twice so far, with my novella-to-novel conversions BEAT and EXPOSURE.
And it may be happening again, because I’ve unpublished one of the novels launched this year. I’ll probably go back to those characters at a later date and write a different book about them. The irony is that the book I published was already a second version. By the time I have written the right book for those characters, I’ll be well into 250,000 words about them alone.
It’s all practice, though. I chose to unpublish because I got some feedback that made me think that book did not represent my work in a way that would cause readers to pick up other books. In other words, if that book were someone’s first of mine, they might not give me another try: the equivalent of a bad first date.
There is other material in the backlist that I have unpublished, because I have different plans for the material. At least two more of the novellas will become full-length novels; a few have been removed as single titles and will be provided only in collections; at least one will be retired, living on only as source material (origin story, if you will) for a different full-length novel.
If anyone wonders ‘why,’ the answer is ‘why not.’ Very few people have seen these things so far. There is no downside to repurposing the material, especially since I am confident I can improve it.
I don’t have to lose any of these characters. I can simply give them a new and better way to live. In real life that’s usually not possible. Thank all the gods for fiction.