Correction, revision or second edition?

Self-published books can be corrected in an afternoon, which is a genuine advantage over print publishing and creates a question print publishing never had to answer: at what point does fixing a book become publishing a different one?

The three cases

Where the line actually is

One test, and it is about the reader rather than the word count: would somebody who owns the old version feel misled if they were sold this as the same book? If the answer is yes, it is a new edition. If the answer is no, it is a correction, however many hours it took you.

• Fixing forty typos — a correction. Nobody bought the typos.
• Updating six screenshots after an interface change — a revision. The book does the same job, slightly better.
• Adding two chapters and reordering the rest — a new edition. Somebody who owns the old one is missing something real.
• Rewriting a chapter that was wrong — a revision, unless the error was central to the book's argument, in which case be honest and version it.
• Changing the title — a new record whatever else you did, because the ISBN is tied to the title.

The ISBN question

An ISBN identifies a specific edition in a specific format. Correcting errors does not create a new edition; substantively changing the content does, and that requires a new ISBN. Changing format — the same words as an EPUB rather than a PDF, or as a paperback — also requires its own ISBN, which catches people out separately.

If your book has no ISBN, none of this applies mechanically and the editorial judgement still does — do you need an ISBN? covers when the answer is genuinely no. Stores that assign their own identifier handle versioning through their own dashboards, which is simpler and gives you less control.

How to push a correction

The mechanics are dull and worth getting right, because the failure mode is quiet: a fixed file on one store and the broken one still selling on three others.

1. Fix it in the source, once. Not in the exported file — in the manuscript, so both exports agree and the fix survives the next export.
2. Re-export the PDF and the EPUB together. A book corrected in one format and not the other is worse than a book with a typo.
3. Validate again. EPUBCheck takes three seconds and catches the thing the edit broke: EPUB validation errors.
4. Re-upload everywhere. Every store, plus your own storefront, plus any download link in an email sequence. Keep the list of places written down; you will not remember all of them.
5. Note what changed, in a file next to the manuscript. In six months you will want to know which version somebody is quoting.

The reason this is a twenty-minute job rather than an afternoon is entirely about how the manuscript is stored. A book that lives as plain text re-exports both formats from the corrected source; a book that lives as a layout file means fixing it once per format and hoping they still match. Self-publishing from Markdown is that argument in full, and correction is where it pays most obviously.

What existing buyers get

This is the part with no universal answer, and the part readers feel strongest about.

• Store buyers are at the mercy of the store. Some push updated files to existing purchasers, sometimes only on request, and you generally cannot control it. Do not promise what the store decides.
• Direct buyers are yours. If you sell from your own storefront, you have their email address and can simply send the new file — which is the cheapest loyalty you will ever buy, and one more entry on the list in where to sell your ebook.
• For a genuine second edition, give existing direct buyers the new one free or at a steep discount. They paid for the book, not for the version number, and the goodwill is worth more than the handful of upgrade sales.
• Say so in the email. "Chapter 6 was wrong, here is the corrected file" earns more trust than silence does, and considerably more than being found out.

What a second edition needs

If you have decided it is genuinely a new edition, do it properly. A half-declared edition confuses buyers and libraries and leaves you with two records that disagree.

• "Second Edition" on the cover, small, usually under the title.
• A new ISBN, and the old edition's record left in place rather than deleted.
• The copyright page updated — new edition, new year, and the first edition's year kept: front and back matter.
• A short preface saying what changed. Half a page. Readers of the first edition want to know whether to buy again, and telling them plainly is what makes them trust the answer.
• The description updated to lead with what is new, because that is what the returning reader is scanning for: how to write a book description.
• A decision about the old edition. Leave it for sale at a lower price, or unpublish it. Both are defensible; leaving it at the same price is not.

How often is too often

Corrections: as often as you find things, forever. There is no cost and no reader is harmed by a book that gets quietly better.

Editions: rarely. A book that reaches its fourth edition in two years signals a book that was published unfinished, and each edition resets the review count that was doing the selling. For a technical book that genuinely dates, every two to three years is a normal rhythm. For anything else, the second edition should be the one that arrives when the first has taught you something big enough to be worth the reset.

And the reason to be relaxed about the first category: a digital book is the only kind you can fix after shipping. Reviews that mention a typo can be answered by removing the typo, which is a thing no printed first run has ever been able to do — see a book launch checklist for where in the schedule that correction pass belongs.