I published my first Kindle ebook on Amazon all the way back in 2010. It was a messy, personal journal I'd kept rather inconsistently starting around 2006. I had no idea how self-publishing worked back when a local author suggested it to me after stumbling upon my old blog where I used to occasionally post to it.
It was quite the journey learning to navigate the whole process. I didn't have lots of money to spend on any of the steps, so I had to dive in head-first and learn most of it on my own without any help. Compared to back then, a lot of the headaches have been removed today for indie authors. However, back around circa 2010, there were a LOT of headaches along the way.
I hadn't realized what a task it would be just to publish a simple text-only ebook! Formatting alone was nightmarish back then.
Ever since the smashing success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was released in 2009, I have been interested in and curious about trying to rework a piece of writing that is in the public domain to publish it on Amazon. I've had a few ideas over the years, but I never got very far along with any of them.
Until today.
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN
So sometime in the past year, I downloaded A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. It's considered the very fist published feminist text ever written, so the value and influence of the work is not contested. I downloaded a free copy from Project Gutenberg and started reading.
It didn't take long to figure out a few things.
Wollstonecraft was painfully ahead of her time in all her ideas and arguments
A lot of the things she complained about and challenged about women's rights are shockingly still relevant to today
Philosphy-heavy passages were easy enough for me to understand and follow
Big chunks of it where she made heavy and repeated historical references or used language common of her era slowed me way down and interrupted the reading/retaining process
After encountering that last issue more times than I could count, I thought I had my idea for how to finally do this project that had been simmering on my back burner for years.
With some help from ChatGPT, I would identify two different things in the text (chapter by chapter, most likely). The first pass would be identifying archaic terminology unlikely to be familiar to modern readers, and the second pass would be to identify proper nouns and historical references that modern readers might need additional information to fully appreciate.
Once we had that information, the next task would be adding brief definitions or explanations as footnotes in the text.
I did manage to make it to around chapter four using this exact process.
But at some point, I became convinced that a better idea would be to have ChatGPT take each chapter and update the text (and also trim it down a bit, since there are lots of very dense passages that are quite stale and no longer have the same relevance they did at the time of writing). I would have him keep the messages intact, respect the ideas expressed, but make the book more accessible to modern readers.
Once I decided on that approach, the actual work only took about one hour.
I copied and pasted the text from each chapter into a chat, then instructed him on modernizing it. Once that was done, I would paste the new version into a new document and move on to the next chapter.
Now, just to put things into perspective a bit:
The original book is not lightweight; it clocks somewhere around 80,000+ words or 375 or so pages.
Our version ended up slightly over 16,000 words, which is not a small reduction of total text
AMAZON'S POLICIES ON PUBLIC DOMAIN
Amazon has pretty strict rules about publishing material that exists in the public domain in the Kindle Store. The reason is pretty easy to figure out: anyone can use the text, so they don't want the store to become flooded in identical books that everyone is trying to sell.
Understandable.
So their policies on public domain works requires that your version is in some way differentiated from others.
Some of the ways they list doing this on their website include:
Translating it into a different language
Adding at least ten unique illustrations
Annotating or providing things like study guides
They don't allow many other low-effort types of books, for clear reasons.
At first I debated internally whether what I did with ChatGPT technically counts as a translation.
Perhaps not in the sense they had intended, but if you are changing the text significantly in order to make it accessible to a group of people who it currently isn't, then that's exactly what I did.
With the help of ChatGPT and some considerable copy-and-paste across the chat, I had my modernized translation up and for sale within about one hour of time.
I made a simple Google Doc without any fancy formatting, just paragraphs and headers for chapters. Then I opened it in Sigil and added the book metadata and separated the text into chapters using split markers. Worked beautifully.