We’ve been looking at the importance of editing over the past few weeks and, so far, we’ve only been considering editing your work before publication.

It’s also possible – increasingly so in the age of self-publishing and digital publishing – to edit your work after publication.

While this is more common with some type of writing than others (non-fiction books on technical topics, for instance, very frequently get new editions), it’s possible for most types of writing.

It’s also nothing especially new, even if you’re a novelist: writers have been editing their work long after publishing it for centuries. Fifteen years ago, when I was an undergraduate student, I studied Samual Richardson’s novel Clarissa. It exists in several different editions, the final revision being more than a decade after the original was published in 1747-8. (Richardson was a printer by trade, which probably made repeatedly editing and republishing his work easier!)

Today, self-publishing authors sometimes edit and republish their novels (particularly early works that may not have been up to the standard of later ones), bloggers frequently revisit and edit posts that have become dated, non-fiction authors put out new editions of their books, and so on: David Gaugran’s Let’s Get Digital is on its third edition, for instance.

If you’re traditionally published, it’s going to be a lot trickier to edit your published work. I would have quite liked to update my book Publishing eBooks For Dummies, which came out back in 2011 – eight years is a lifetime in self-publishing! Sadly, the ongoing sales didn’t justify the costs for the publisher of creating of a new edition.

Assuming that you do have the ability to edit your work and republish it, though, why might you do so?

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