Why I republished my first collection of short stories fourteen years after the first edition

The Kind I'm Likely to Get, 1999

The Kind I'm Likely to Get, 2013

Last year I was able to put out an ebook edition of my story collection The Kind I'm Likely to Get. Here's an extended version of my author's note from the ebook edition, with some of the backstory on the original publication as well as the how and why of how it fell quickly out of print and why I wanted to put it back in circulation.  You can buy the ebook for 99 cents at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and iBooks.  

When I first published The Kind I’m Likely to Get, in 1999, it was after years of rejections.  During that time, I’d met with agents, including one who was puzzled by the idea that the stories should be read in order.  I hadn’t thought it was so revolutionary, or that agents didn’t read things in order.  Why couldn’t it be a novel, others asked.  But it wasn’t a novel, and it didn’t aspire to be one.  Eventually, after firing my agent, it was published as a paperback original by William Morrow.  Even then, part of the reason it was picked up was that they were introducing a line of paperback original fiction and had a slot to fill.  This is how publishing works. 

It was a relief when it began to get positive reviews from places like The New York Times.  Maybe I would have the chance to publish again!  But just as quickly, Morrow was sold to HarperCollins and when the second printing of The Kind I’m Likely to Get ran down, it was never reprinted.  But, technically, it was available as a print-on-demand title, so they could retain the rights.  So, readers could order the title, but bookstores couldn’t return unsold copies for credit, which meant they were unlikely to keep any copies on the shelf. 

But in 1999, when I was negotiating my contract, I managed to strike electronic rights without anyone batting an eye.  We still weren’t sure what electronic rights actually were, and I was a completely unknown writer, so no one really cared one way or another. 

More than a decade later, after writing a series of books about life with dogs, reissuing my stories seemed like a good idea.  In the intervening years, I would still occasionally hear from people who had been inspired by the book, and it seemed likely that there may be a few curious readings of my dog work who might find the stories interesting as a relic of my pre-canine life, if not for other reasons.  As I prepared the files, I realized that it would also be easy to add some extras—including commentary on each story, which you, the reader, can choose to read or ignore.  Revisiting some of these old stories was a joy, because there were sentences and paragraphs that I'd forgotten about which took my by surprise in a great way. What was I thinking when I wrote some of these things?  And there were certainly some stories that I recognized as noble attempts, even if they didn't quite succeed at what I may have been attempting.  

I’ve also added four newer stories, Stories About Animals.  While there are virtually no animals in The Kind I’m Likely to Get, they are unavoidable in my more recent work.  And, to me, the stories with animals are warmer, richer and more emotional than the shell-shocked characters of my original collection.  But I’ll let you be the final judge.