When Is It Not the Best Time to Write the 2nd Edition?

Have you ever thought of writing the second edition for your books? I did that some time ago and labeled those potential projects as “maybe someday,” which in its essence was a “no” answer.

But recently, this question reappeared again, and not for one but for two of the books I published three years ago.

How it all began

It all started with a conversation I had two weeks ago, on April 29, 2020, with a consultant from Startup Club Aalborg of the Aalborg municipality, Denmark, where my family and I live. He listened with interest about what I do in my business. He praised me for being productive and publishing sixteen books in a little over five years, along with conducting and completing many consulting and training projects. He asked me whether I thought of writing and publishing on Medium.com.

I said that I did but didn’t pursue this line of thought yet. I had this idea that I preferred writing books to blog posts and articles.

But this time was different. After practicing Self-Gamification — a self-help approach uniting anthropology, kaizen, and gamification to turn anything in life into fun games — for several years now, I nowadays give an idea a chance by testing it before dismissing it as something not being for me. Being open-minded and testing those ideas as if they were games, which I haven’t tried playing yet but was curious about, paid off in so many ways.

So after finishing my conversation with the Startup Club consultant, I researched more profoundly than I did in the past what Medium was about and what other writers thought of it.

I was caught and inspired.

The books I have written and published over the years got great feedback from those who read them, and many found my messages appealing. But as many other writers relatively early in their career, I am looking for ways to reach more people who might be interested in what I have to say than what I managed so far with the book sales and marketing.

Medium seems to be an excellent platform for spreading the word and being paid for one’s writing.

Thus, I spent the rest of April 29, 2020, learning more, setting my account, and preparing the first couple of stories to publish the next day.

But reading many stories (and becoming a Medium member in the process) on how to be a successful writer and making a living on Medium took most of that day and continued on the following days.

I discovered Feedium and J.J. Pryor. I read several of his articles on Medium, including those about top writers and topics they write about.

In the subsequent days, I read articles and watched videos by Ayodeji Awosika, and found his advice on following the top writers and reverse engineering their success enlightening.

I was delighted to discover resources about writing and publishing on Medium in my preferred learning format, books. The book Make Money on Medium by Nicole Akers caught my attention due to the captivating, humorous, and concise writing style but also due to the fantastic reviews by some of the most successful writers on Medium.

From this book, I learned about the headline analyzers and appreciated the simple secrets of writing good headlines. Suddenly, writing a headline was not a chore but a fun little game, where I competed with myself to get the top score — and reach the recommended 80% target — for my headline.

One of the top writers I discovered in different lists and resources was Tom Kuegler. I subscribed to his free 5-day e-mail course on Medium and eagerly read each of the e-mails, followed his advice, and continued publishing every weekday.

In one of his e-mails, Tom suggested, among other great advice, to choose several topics to write about and always to write about the same topic on the same weekday.

I loved that idea, also because I still could have one thread running through all of them. That was the possibility of turning our lives into fun games. You can turn anything into fun games. Thus, I could write, for example, about:

• Turning work and business aspects into fun games on Mondays,
• Practical issues of turning life into exciting games on Tuesdays,
• Turning writing into engaging games on Wednesdays,
• Gameful parenting and maybe also teaching, as well as family life and health on Thursdays, and
• Books and articles, which inspire me, especially when it comes to living gamefully, but also beyond that, on Fridays.

So, I looked into the books I had published so far and tried to find out which parts of them I could share on Medium. Two of these candidates were Take Control of Your Business and Cheerleading for Writers, both published in 2017.

I was turning my life into games by this time, including the writing and publishing of these two books. But my approach to turning my life into a game, which I call Self-Gamification, was not ripe yet to be shared with the world, even if I had a little book on how to turn one project into a game called 5 Minute Perseverance Game.

To write or not to write the second edition?

So, I wondered how I could use the material of these two books and extend it to include the topic of turning business and writing into fun games.

I was excited about the idea that I would finally create the second edition of these two books.

But when I started rereading them, a strange thing happened.

I liked what I read.

Well, of course, it was a good sign that the material still stood and appealed to me also several years after I wrote and published it. Which non-fiction writer wouldn’t want that?

I started contemplating how I could add the Self-Gamification aspects to the content I read but found myself struggling with that.

When I looked at what was happening inside my head non-judgmentally, and with curiosity, like an anthropologist would do while studying an exciting for her culture, I realized that writing the second edition for these two books didn’t make much sense to me at this point.

These books still rang true, but they were like pictures taken of me in the past. I moved on, even if I continued using the lessons learned there and would always recommend reading them.

But my interest shifted, and my curiosity peaked when I thought of what new material I could create for businesses and writers.

Saying “yes” to something else

So, the answer is still “no” to whether I would write the second edition for my books Take Control of Your Business and Cheerleading for Writers.

Instead, this is what I want to do, will do, and already started doing. I will create something new and use some quotes and excerpts or refer to the material there. I will also share the content of my later books, which contain information about Self-Gamification on various specific topics.

For businesses and writing, these are and will be among possible other Book 1 (Gameful Project Management) and Book 4 (Gameful Writing) from the “Gameful Life” series. I published the former in January 2020, and the latter is due to come out in May, the latest June.

But in general, I will be writing new material, just like this article and a couple before it — because it’s fun. Because I’m curious what else can come to my mind, and because I am passionate about sharing the possibility of turning our lives into fun games, including business matters and writing.

Besides, I can test all those ideas as a writer and entrepreneur like gamers test new games on the market.

I have no idea how these new projects will develop and whether they will become books or remain a series of articles. Time will show.

The fun will be my guide

But my compass will be fun, or how I love calling it more precisely, my “Fun Detecting Antenna.” This extraordinary device is nothing more than an awareness of what is fun for me.

Here is what I have written about fun in my book Gameful Project Management:

“Fun can show in different ways. One time while we have fun and enjoy something we might laugh, and at other times, while fully engaged in a video game or fantasy novel, we might frown and appear quite tense. But we are still having fun!

There is another excellent feature of fun. You can discover it anywhere and in anything. Even in those activities you initially claim not to be fun.

We can discover fun when we give that project or activity a chance, approach it with curiosity and without prejudice, while being open to recognizing the fun factors in there, or we can bring fun elements into the project deliberately. Or all of these together.

How can we do this?

Curiosity and passion can help us here. I call them the siblings of fun in this inspirational trio, one preceding and the other succeeding the birth of fun in each moment. These triplets helped us, humans, to choose and pave previously unfathomable paths. “

— Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, Gameful Project Management

Each of my writing and other projects had been such an unfathomable adventure. Even if I am an “infant-writer” on Medium right now, and my career here is less than two weeks old, I can tell you that all three children of intuition — curiosity, fun, and passion — are here with and for me. They brought me here in the first place. And I am thrilled to let them guide me on this fantastic adventure.

For books on Self-Gamification and beyond, visit me on my website — “Optimist Writer.”