The tweaks are coming pretty much in three flavors. (BTW, only the first four books are being tweaked: everything after The Wizard's Dilemma is pretty much OK.)
(a) Tech stuff. Fixing old outdated tech material, and adding features that the present readership expects as part of normal teen and preteen life (where appropriate): cellphones, computers, etc. Also, tweaking action and some plot elements to reflect the effect that today's tech would realistically have on them. (For example, it no longer makes sense to hold exposition over the phone in a phone booth.) Various allied issues (i.e., a line like "Why would I ever come over to your house? You don't even have a color TV" seriously needs to be revised to suit this century). My readership is very sensitive to this stuff and has been writing me about it... so time to get busy.
(b) Cultural / historical issues. The Ireland of A Wizard Abroad, for example, is not the Ireland of today... and everyone knows it: the book comes across as seriously dated because of this. (High Wizardry possibly has the worst case of this, though its problems also fall under (a) above.) There is also the question of attempting to lay down a more sensible timeline. This has its own challenges and the discussions have been going on for long enough... time to bite this bullet. (Go over to the YW discussion forums (http://www.youngwizards.com/forums) and search on the term "timeline" and see what's been going on.)
(c) General stylistic polish. For example, I'm a lot better at dialogue than I used to be due to all the screen work of the last decade. Much dialogue in the first four books needs to be loosened up so it no longer sounds stiff or peculiar to the younger reader. And there are some other minor stylistic and structural issues that are obvious to me but probably not to other people.
...Nobody should panic when they see this set of agendas. I'm aware of the dangers of fixing what's not broken, but equally aware of ignoring issues that could cause the loss of my next generation of readers if they're note addressed. I intend to come at this with a light touch and not change anything really major. But the sooner this work is done, the better. The revised ebooks will serve as the preferred texts for when the US publisher next goes to press on the series as a whole: and for the texts on which we'll be basing the region-specific international print editions to come (as I no longer plan to wait for foreign publishers -- I'm going to start doing my own other-language editions. German and French first: then we'll see what happens next).
Anyway, because of the revisions making them significantly different from the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt versions, I will be able to market these books in the US. So that'll make a lot of people happy. :)
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(a) Tech stuff. Fixing old outdated tech material, and adding features that the present readership expects as part of normal teen and preteen life (where appropriate): cellphones, computers, etc. Also, tweaking action and some plot elements to reflect the effect that today's tech would realistically have on them. (For example, it no longer makes sense to hold exposition over the phone in a phone booth.) Various allied issues (i.e., a line like "Why would I ever come over to your house? You don't even have a color TV" seriously needs to be revised to suit this century). My readership is very sensitive to this stuff and has been writing me about it... so time to get busy.
(b) Cultural / historical issues. The Ireland of A Wizard Abroad, for example, is not the Ireland of today... and everyone knows it: the book comes across as seriously dated because of this. (High Wizardry possibly has the worst case of this, though its problems also fall under (a) above.) There is also the question of attempting to lay down a more sensible timeline. This has its own challenges and the discussions have been going on for long enough... time to bite this bullet. (Go over to the YW discussion forums (http://www.youngwizards.com/forums) and search on the term "timeline" and see what's been going on.)
(c) General stylistic polish. For example, I'm a lot better at dialogue than I used to be due to all the screen work of the last decade. Much dialogue in the first four books needs to be loosened up so it no longer sounds stiff or peculiar to the younger reader. And there are some other minor stylistic and structural issues that are obvious to me but probably not to other people.
...Nobody should panic when they see this set of agendas. I'm aware of the dangers of fixing what's not broken, but equally aware of ignoring issues that could cause the loss of my next generation of readers if they're note addressed. I intend to come at this with a light touch and not change anything really major. But the sooner this work is done, the better. The revised ebooks will serve as the preferred texts for when the US publisher next goes to press on the series as a whole: and for the texts on which we'll be basing the region-specific international print editions to come (as I no longer plan to wait for foreign publishers -- I'm going to start doing my own other-language editions. German and French first: then we'll see what happens next).
Anyway, because of the revisions making them significantly different from the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt versions, I will be able to market these books in the US. So that'll make a lot of people happy. :)