After publication: errors, corrections, and second editions
Publication is a date rather than an ending, and several of the things that decide how a book is received happen months before it. Review outlets publish their own deadlines, and those deadlines are earlier than most first-time authors expect. What follows covers the schedule, what can be fixed afterward, and where a correction becomes a new edition.
Who does the marketing?
The publisher runs the trade side and the author is expected to contribute. Publicity, catalog placement, sales representation to bookstores and libraries, and review submissions belong to the house. Appearances, interviews, and whatever an author can do with their own readers belong to the author.
The proportion varies with what the house has committed to the book, and that varies far more than most authors expect. A title with a marketing budget and a title without one receive different amounts of the same publisher's attention.
Publishing independently means the whole of it, including the parts that require credentials. Submitting to review outlets, for instance, is done by publishers under published rules, and an author acting as their own publisher has to meet them.
What is an advance reader copy, and do I need them?
An advance reader copy is a pre-publication version, often a bound galley or a digital galley, circulated to reviewers, booksellers, and librarians before the book is finished. It exists because the people who decide whether to stock or review a book work months ahead.
The deadlines are published and they are strict. Publishers Weekly requires submissions three months before the first day of the month of publication, and prefers four.1 Library Journal asks for review copies six months prior to publication.2
An author who wants trade review coverage therefore needs galleys well before the book is finished in any ordinary sense. A book that reaches its publication date without them has already passed the point at which those outlets could consider it.
How do reviews happen?
Through submission, under rules each outlet publishes. Publishers Weekly requires digital galleys through its own platform and states that it does not accept galleys through the two common third-party services.1 Library Journal accepts digital galleys, bound galleys, bound page proofs, or bound manuscripts, and asks for one copy.2
Both publish exclusions, and the exclusions catch authors out. Publishers Weekly does not review reissues or new editions unless 70 percent or more of the content is new, and also excludes textbooks, technical manuals, travel guides, and several other categories.1 Library Journal directs children's and young adult titles elsewhere and excludes highly technical specialist titles.2
Reader reviews on retail sites operate on none of these rules and none of these schedules. They matter commercially and they are not what publishers mean by a review.
What do I do if there is an error in the printed book?
Record it precisely and report it to the publisher, with the page and the exact wording. Nothing can be done with a report that an error exists somewhere in chapter four.
What happens next depends on the format and the print arrangement. A book printed on demand can be corrected in the file and the next copy printed will carry the correction. A conventional print run cannot be changed until it is reprinted, and copies already in warehouses and shops keep the error.
An errata list is the conventional answer for anything that cannot wait, and Chicago recognizes errata among the standard parts of a book's back matter.3 For an ebook the corrected file can usually be resubmitted, though how quickly readers who already own it receive the update is a matter for the retail platform.
Can a book be corrected after publication?
It can, and the mechanism differs by format. Print on demand and ebooks take corrections continuously, since the file is what gets printed or downloaded. A conventionally printed book takes them at the next impression, which is why publishers keep a running list of accumulated corrections against that moment. On a slow-selling title, that moment may never arrive.
What corrections do not do is change the copies already sold. A book whose error has been quoted, reviewed, or indexed elsewhere carries that error in the record whatever the current file says.
Substantive changes are a different matter from corrections, and they raise a question about identity. A book that has been materially altered is not quite the same book, which is where the next question begins.
When is it a second edition rather than a correction?
The trade draws the line at how much has changed, and one published threshold is unusually explicit. Publishers Weekly declines to review reissues or new editions unless 70 percent or more of the content is new.1 That is a review policy rather than a definition, and it is the clearest number anyone publishes.
The other practical marker is the identifier. The International ISBN Agency treats each product form as requiring separate identification, and a genuinely new edition is treated as a new publication rather than as the same one reprinted.4
Between the two sits a wide middle ground: a book with a new preface, updated figures, or a corrected chapter. Whether that is called a second edition is a publisher's decision, and calling it one has consequences for cataloging, for review eligibility, and for readers who already own the first.
Is this a series, and did I write the first book as though it were?
The second half is the one that causes trouble. A first book written as a self-contained novel and then continued has to accommodate everything it settled, and characters resolved in the first book are the ones the second has to unsettle.
The record is what makes it manageable. A style sheet, a character list, and a chronology built during the first book are what a second book is checked against, and reconstructing them afterward from a printed text is slower and less reliable.
Series bibles exist for exactly this and they are worth starting late rather than not at all. An editor working on book three cannot know that a detail contradicts book one unless somebody wrote book one's details down.
Should an author write a series opener as though the series is certain?
Each practice is common, and each fails in its own way. A first book written as an opener may end without resolving enough, which is a real risk when no second book is contracted. A first book written as a standalone may close off the material a series would need.
The middle position most editors will recognize is a book that resolves its own story while leaving its world and its cast able to continue. That is a structural decision, and it is made in the ending rather than in the planning.
What nobody can tell an author in advance is whether the series will happen. Writer Beware is explicit that no reputable editor will tell an author their book has huge commercial potential or is likely to become a best seller.5 A confident prediction about a series is that same claim in a longer form. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, including books that are the first of something.
References
- Publishers Weekly, Submission Guidelines. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/corp/submissionguidelines.html ↩
- Library Journal, Review Submissions. https://www.libraryjournal.com/page/Review-Submissions ↩
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, chapter 1, Books and Journals. University of Chicago Press. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part1/ch01/toc.html ↩
- International ISBN Agency, What is an ISBN? https://www.isbn-international.org/content/what-isbn/10 ↩
- SFWA, Writer Beware: Editors and Editing, updated December 14, 2025. https://sfwa.org/other-resources/writer-beware/editors/ ↩