Vegan Freak, 2nd. ed.
Vegan Freak has been successful beyond our expectations, and it has clearly been a useful book for a lot of people. We get email often from people telling us that the book was instrumental in getting them to go or stay vegan. And to be honest, that’s what we wrote the book for. So in that regard, it is working as we’d hoped, and we’ve certainly sold far more than the 1000 copies that we thought would be our maximum in our wildest dreams.
But in truth, we sometimes look back at the book and think about things that we’d change, or do differently. This is natural as we’ve grown and changed.
With that in mind, we’ve been talking with a publisher about doing a 2nd edition of Vegan Freak, to debut this coming Fall 2008. While the traditional rule is that a 2nd edition requires 10% different/new content, we’re thinking about rewriting most of Vegan Freak from the ground up to better reflect the experience that we’ve gained in the years since publishing the book. We’re dedicated to keeping the book accessible and conversational yet analytical. We see a lot of places where we could improve upon the original, and we’re going to devote this coming summer to this work. I suspect this’ll result in a book that’s fairly similar in tone, but perhaps tighter in its arguments and advice. Still, it will essentially be a new book.
Another cool thing about the 2nd edition is that the publisher we’re talking with is interested in alternative distribution models, including e-books and more. Thus, you can expect to see Vegan Freak as a DRM-free e-book. We’re also kicking around the idea of doing an audio book as well, which we would record and produce, but distribute through the publisher’s channels. We know an audiobook would be an amazing amount of work — we estimate probably 2-3 solid weeks of writing, recording, and editing — but I think it could be a really effective way to get our ideas across, and given the surprising success of our podcast over the past few years, I suspect people would go for it if the price was right. As with everything else, our goal is to make sure that what we produce is accessible, inexpensive, and user/reader friendly.
Though none of this is certain or set in stone, we’re thinking about new ways of getting the message and ideas in Vegan Freak out there, and our potential new publisher is keen on these ideas. The next few months should be exciting times, and hopefully, we’ll continue to produce something that gets people to seriously consider veganism and animal rights.
