Find Your (re)Purpose
Repurposing Content
Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life, your one-stop shop for the unhinged writing, editing, and publishing industry takes you can’t get anywhere else because frankly there is no market for them.
Last night a Shelf Life topic came to me in a dream. Even as I lay there dreaming, I realized the topic was gold, would draft up quickly, and satisfy readers. I thought, “I can’t wait to wake up and write Shelf Life.” But alas I woke and realized the dream topic was something completely inane like “Porcupines: Can They Write Books?” and then I had to think of an actual topic for today, so that sucked.
Also I’m writing today’s Shelf Life early because at the appointed Shelf Life–writing time (ie, at the last minute) I have to go see a man about a dog. Like, I literally have to go see a man about a dog, I am getting a second dog, from a man I have to go see. I have been waiting to use that euphemism non-euphemistically for like three months. The dog tax will be paid in due time. (For the Less Online™ among my readership: “The dog tax” refers to a photo of the dog, which one is legally obligated to provide when one mentions a dog on the internet.)
Today’s article is, regretfully, not about whether porcupines can write books, but about repurposing, reusing, and recycling your content, why you would, how to do that, and when you can and can’t.
When I was in college I was introduced to the concept of self-plagiarism when I had two different professors in two different classes each somehow assign the same essay topic at the same time. I said to one of the professors, who was my adviser, “Since I have two assignments on symbolism in Heart of Darkness, I’ll just write it once and turn it in twice” and he said, “No, you can’t do that, that is self-plagiarism.”
I contend, still, today, twenty years later, that it would not have been. Self-plagiarism is another way of saying duplicate publication, which means to publish the same intellectual material twice in different venues (excluding a reprint of already-published material, which is fine). However, I was not to publish my assignment in two different journals; I was going to turn it in to two different professors. That is not the same thing at all.
Ultimately, there’s a lot to say about symbolism in Heart of Darkness and I rarely run short of words so it didn’t matter. I did not repurpose my content that day.
What it means to repurpose content is to take the same content and use it again, for something else. Publishers do this all the time. Consider this fictional example:
Publishing company PubHouse releases a book of essays by author Jane Q Public. Readers purchase the book.
Later, with the agreement of Dr Public, the publisher includes a selection of her essays from that book in an online library of curated content taken from all the essay collections PubHouse has ever put out. Users pay a subscription fee to access this library.
Still later, PubHouse releases a new collection called Best Essays of 2023 that includes one of Dr Public’s essays (again with Dr Public’s agreement) alongside other essays they have published in 2023. Readers purchase the book.
In this example, the content Dr Public wrote once has been included in three different products that all earned revenue. It is theoretically possible that a single user, perhaps an avid consumer of essays, may have paid for the same piece of Dr Public’s content up to three times (if they purchased both books and a subscription to the essay library).
Another example, which I cited in Now You’re Cooking, is from cookbook publishing. The publisher in this case owns all the recipes. They have a big recipe bank. Cookbook writers sign up on a for-hire basis and pull a selection of recipes out of the bank to create a cookbook, adding only the flavor text to each recipe. The recipe itself—the list of ingredients and instructions—is not copyrightable and therefore, as long as the ancillary text of the cookbook is unique, the cookbook itself is not a duplicate publication.
In the cookbook example, the same basic recipe for shepherd’s pie might become “Molly Weasley’s Magical Shepherd’s Pie” for a Harry Potter–themed cookbook, “Tyrion Lannister’s ‘I Drink And I Know Shepherd’s Pie’” for a Game of Thrones–themed cookbook, and “Quick and Easy Weeknight Shepherd’s Pie” in a cookbook of dinner recipes for busy parents.
Again, a busy, cookbook-using parent who is a fan of both Harry Potter and Game of Thrones could theoretically pay three times for the same shepherd’s pie recipe.
The key in both of these fictional instances is that the publisher is not publishing the same collection of content twice. Each time they release a product, the contents are different. They’re made up of components previously published, but the combination of components is unique.
There are other ways of republishing the same content: Chiefly, a reprint or a revised edition. To reprint a book or other piece of content means to issue the same thing again, under a new ISBN or the original one, with a new publisher or the original one. Let’s say I self-publish a novel and then it’s so great that a big 5 publisher picks it up to publish (the dream, right?) the big-5-publisher’s edition would be a reprint. They are printing the same thing again, under a new ISBN and a different masthead/imprint, but it’s the same thing.
A revised edition is a new edition of the same content for which substantial changes have been made. A revised edition may be called “Revised” or it may be the second, third, fourth, fifth, twelfth edition, or the twentieth-anniversary edition, or whatever. For a title to be called a new edition, there has to be a substantial change in the content from the previous edition to the new. What constitutes a substantial change is debatable and changes depending on type of book and who you ask.
For instance, the KDP program provides the following guidance about new editions:
Significant changes include updates to the core book details (author name, cover, title, etc.) and manuscript updates that result in page count changes by more than 10%. Updates to certain book details, sometimes called metadata, also require a new edition. These book details include, title, primary author name, ISBN, trim size, and ink and paper type.
In the textbook business there are rules and best practices to follow to prevent publishers slapping “New Edition” on a textbook every year to get around the used book market. In fiction, that is, for novels, you would generally only issue a true new edition if you were adding significant content to the book, like a new foreword, introduction, or afterword—for instance, for an anniversary or special edition. You would not characterize your book as a new edition because you fixed three typos scattered throughout the book before the second printing.
I’m guessing that most folks who read Shelf Life and are writers are writers of fiction, because in my experience there are always more writers of fiction around than of nonfiction. When it comes to fiction, new and revised editions are rarely in play. Reprints are much more common, as titles sometimes migrate from publisher to publisher when rights expire.
But none of that precludes the possibility of repurposing.
First, a disclaimer about publication rights. This part is important, don’t skip it.
Once you have published something, it is published. It cannot be unpublished. You can remove it from sale and make it unavailable for purchase, but that doesn’t unpublish it. It has still been published. Even if no one purchased it while it was available for sale and no copies are in anyone’s possession anywhere. Once you publish something, it’s published forever. It doesn’t matter if you published it in your local newspaper or on your blog that has three readers or on your Patreon or on Kindle. Published is published. Forever.
You can never sell the right of first publication for something after it has been published. Thereafter, it may only be sold with reprint rights. First publication rights are valuable. Always give due consideration before using them.
With that said, here are the two main ways I’ve seen fiction content repurposed by writers and authors—a little something to get your wheels turning.
Eat Your Leftovers
I don’t mean actually eat them, I mean like use them. In the course of writing, revising, editing, and writing some more, you’re probably going to end up with some content that doesn’t make the final cut. Scenes that got removed. Earlier revisions that look nothing like the final book. Do not throw these away—that would be so wasteful. If you save these, you can use them later.
For instance, the book Stephen Hero is actually the very first, unrevised draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After the original was rejected several times, Joyce purportedly threw it into the fire. Nora Barnacle (sometimes called Nora Joyce, James’s wife) fished it out of the fire and stashed it away. It was eventually published and, because it is so different to the final Portrait, is sometimes studied alongside the much-more-famous final version.
A scene you love but had to cut from your novel because it just didn’t support the main plot might be perfectly suited for sharing with fans of your novel on Patreon or your blog as a fun extra or developing into a short story that takes place in the same setting as your novel.
I even hang onto particularly good sentences—well, the ones I think are good—that don’t make it into the work they were originally written for. If I wrote a good sentence, I am dang sure going to use it eventually. I don’t write that many, I need all the ones I can get.
Today Patreon, Tomorrow the World
First publication rights come into the equation at this point. Something I have seen some fellow writers do is release stories first to their paying patrons (on a platform like Patreon or on a paid-subscription Substack) and then, later, publish the story to a wider audience.
This could be in the form of, for instance, releasing a short story first to Patreon or Substack subscribers and then, later, publishing it in another place like a journal or a collection of short stories that is available to all readers and not just your subscribers.
Please be aware that selling reprint rights to publishers and prestigious journals that publish fiction is not easy; they want first publication rights. This is a sounder strategy for a writer who intends to self-publish the work anyway. I will never advise self-publishing first with a plan to publish the same work traditionally later on. That can happen but it’s vanishingly rare.
Another method is to release longform work serially, chapter by chapter, to paying subscribers and then later on publish the completed work as a book available to all. That’s how a lot of Dickens’s work was published—serially first in newspapers and then later as a complete, compiled book.
Readers who subscribe and got the content early may still go on to buy the finished book—keep in mind the 1000 True Fans concept of dedicated fans who will buy anything you put out—especially if you put a little extra something exclusive in the finished book (like some of the leftovers I mentioned above).
That’s the ultimate trick in repurposing your content: Each “unit” that contains repurposed content should be unique. Review the above example of Dr Jane Q Public’s essays. Remember there were three products in the example:
A book of essays by Jane Q Public.
A book of essays by many authors, one of which is by Jane Q Public and also appears in her solo essay compilation.
An online, subscription-based essay library that contains some, but not all, of Jane Q Public’s essays from her book as well as essays by other writers across the PubHouse family of authors.
No three products contain the same set of content, and no one product contains the entire set of content from any of the others.
If you want to read all the essays from Jane Q Public’s book, you must get her book. Not all the essays are available in the essay library or in Best Essays of 2023.
If you want to read all the essays in Best Essays of 2023, you must buy that book. Not all the essays therein are necessarily available in the essay library.
If you want to read essays that are not contained in Jane Q Public’s book or in Best Essays of 2023, you must subscribe to the essay library (or buy more books).
If all the essays from Dr Public’s book, or from Best Essays of 2023, were in the essay library, you could subscribe to the library and have no need to purchase the books—but the books contain exclusive content not found in the essay library. Conversely, the essay library contains content not found in either book. Though the content in the essay library can be found in other books by PubHouse, you would probably have to buy a cost-prohibitive quantity of books to get all the content, while the library subscription is cost effective.
This might feel like a hat trick—trying to get your readers to buy the same thing multiple times—but it’s actually not. The whole point is that you can’t re-publish exactly the same thing under a different name to dupe readers into buying it twice. That’s duplicate publication as I mentioned at the start, and that’s the thing you can’t do (it’s academically/intellectually dishonest, bad form, and in some cases/under some terms of service like KDP, may be prohibited).
Offering exclusive content as an incentive to secure a subscription or sell a new or special edition isn’t a hat trick; it’s publishing.
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