process: reprintland
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
In the midst of everything (my partner’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, teaching after a few years off, parenting, and keeping tabs on my octogenarian mother), I’m also in the process of preparing for my three books to be reprinted next year.
Today I proposed edits to catalog copy. While doing that, I remembered an exercise I did way back when I had my first agent who was pitching Excavation to editors. The exercise entailed writing 100 versions of the book’s description.
While I never actually wrote 100 versions, I liked the prompt and what it produced. I used a similar prompt in writing other short descriptions, such as artist statements. After about 33 or so tries, I’d have a paragraph that closely relayed the information I was trying to get across in the most artful way possible.
A couple of weeks ago I sat in my car in the parking lot of the institute I’m teaching at this year, and as I was about to get out and find my way around campus after several years’ absence, an email arrived. In it were potential book cover drafts for all three books. In the days after, like the catalog copy, I sat with the covers downloaded to my phone, thinking not only about what I liked and how the covers represented the books, but also how the past covers came about, and the process of landing on each of those covers. So many differences in experience.
In the future I’ll share the entire reprint process—which for me began in a conversation in Fall 2022 when I was doing a 10 day Tin House writing residency—from start to finish. Today I wanted to share a taste of this process, which is one I haven’t read much about. A reprint is not a “new” book so doesn’t generate the same kind of attention, though it will be new to many readers. A reprint takes “old” material and presents it anew. A reprint can potentially hold all that has changed in the collective consciousness/unconsciousness in the years since it was first published and can refresh, affirm, and challenge its past, present, and future readers.
There are still a number of steps, and months, before new versions of the books will be in my hands and hopefully yours.
If you have specific experiences with reprints—whether your own books being reprinted, or reading reprinted books that you’ve loved, or reading reprints that are new to you and how you even learned of their existence—feel free to share in the comments.
Happy Fall, Everyone.
For more process-related posts, check these out.
Process Letter by Grace Montgomery