I got my rights back. Now what?
I think I’ve talked plenty of times everywhere else about the ~saga that has been Midnights in Bali. I figured, for posterity (and in case this is happening to you too, that I might as well tell the story here). This isn’t a witchunt or anything, I’m not asking anyone to go up in arms to fight whoever. This is just what happened, and I wanted to talk about what you can do next. Or, what I did next.
The Book
Midnights in Bali was written in 2015 for #SparkNA, a contemporary romance writing class where authors who finished their books had the chance to be published under Anvil’s just launched Spark line. It was a huge opportunity (at the time), and I joined the class not really knowing what would happen next. So, fueled by inspiration, a lot of reading and writing, and my own trip to Bali, I wrote a story about a girl who didn’t quite make it to law school, and decided to escape to Bali, where she runs into a Scottish-Hong Kong dweller and learns what it really means to take risks.
I finished writing (shock), the editors liked it enough to choose to publish (double shock!) and in 2016, I signed a contract for Anvil to have exclusive publishing rights to Midnights in Bali for five years. In 2017 we joined their Feels Cafe event, where we launched the new Spark books, the older Spark books, and a lot of others. We were a small part of the program, but we enjoyed that small part we were given.
Everything was going fine. The books were launched and out in the wild! We should rejoice! Celebrate! Be happy!
Maybe.
The bad
About a year later the shine started to wear off. I was writing books that now felt much “better” and farther and farther away from the 25,000 unedited words that were published. After that initial group launch, not much else happened. Even the imprint itself seemed to freeze, with no new books being published. Because we were writers and fellow colleagues, we talked about what worked for us, what didn’t, what we could have done better.
It became harder and harder to find my book on the shelves, and with very little discernible marketing push from the publisher. One of the other books in the imprint was charting on bestseller lists, but still, hard to find. Eventually my ebooks were earning three times more in one year than Bali was, and Bali was supposed to be the “successfully published” one.
We just felt…forgotten. Or at least these stories did.
So when my contract with Anvil expired last year, I wrote a letter saying I wanted my rights back. I asked my lawyer to read it (i.e. make me sound less upset than I was about the whole thing) and formatted it all nice and professional. I reviewed the contract to make sure I got my dates right, checked what I had to do to make sure that it wasn’t suddenly, automatically renewed. It took a while (and with no response), but the book was eventually taken down from the site, final royalties were given, and the end. Scott and Ava’s story was “dead,” and suddenly I had this book from 2015 that I didn’t know what to do with anymore.
Except I did.
The rewrite
It was Mina V Esguerra who did this first, when she released new covers of her fromerly trad pubbed books, with bonus scenes, or tiny changes. I thought it was brilliant. It was a way to make her books fit her brand again, to give old readers something new, and new readers something to love. I did something similar (if not a little extreme) with If The Dress Fits, where the story was good as is, but needed the love interest’s POV to be richer.
It was a long, personal, emotional journey for me to get to this point. I had spent some time wondering why I didn’t feel more “successful.” If I just wasn’t good enough, because I wasn’t being validated by the places I thought I would get it.
But maybe I’m getting older, because my conclusion was that I just…stopped giving a fuck. The part I loved here was the writing. The sharing of the kilig. And Scott and Ava would live in any form that I chose for them, because it was my story that I was telling here.
So I sat down and just went wild with this new edition. I changed the premise, the love interest (sorry, David Tennant), the characters, the supporting characters. Everything. What didn’t change was Bali, how I saw it, how magical I still thought it was. At this point, I had gone a second time and found more things to write about, more things to fall in love with.
Suddenly I was proud of this book again. Of the journey it had to go through to get to this point, and how it changed and evolved.
I was even more thrilled that more than ever, this story was mine again. I owned it fully, and could do what I wanted, sell it how I wanted. I could have it edited by beta readers and editors who knew me, and knew romance.
This new version, it’s not going to be in a bookstore. But bookstores aren’t the dream anymore. They stopped being “the dream” when we could deliver a print copy of my book to anyone, anywhere in the Philippines or around the world with a click of a button. When we found people to partner with to make audiobooks happen, on accessible platforms. When the people who loved my work surrounded me with support and love, it made it easy to let go.
So here’s the big announcement. One that I am eagerly anticipating, and one that feels like my own version of a happy ending to a story that had (for a very long time) felt like a failure.
Some Bali to Love will be available this October.
More announcements soon.