Love in a Small Town has been revised and expanded!
I wrote the first edition of Love in a Small Town in the summer of 2014. I had been laid off from my job, and this series, Pine Harbour, was my first attempt at writing something as a full-time romance author. My first series designed to be commercial, a balance between what my natural storytelling is and what resonates with the market.
Between then and now, I have written eight more books in this world (seven more in this series, and the first book in a spin-off series, The Kincaids of Pine Harbour).
In 2015, I started working with a new editor, Kristi Yanta, and from the third book (Love on a Spring Morning), Kristi has given me invaluable revision notes on the entire series.
Which brings us back to this first book…I mean, I love Rafe and Olivia. They appear all the way through the series. But this was only the fourth novel I had ever written. It was rushed in places, and some of the sentence-level writing no longer matched what I write now.
So I asked Kristi to go back and read the first book in the series. A year after she did that for me, I’m so proud to introduce you to the second edition of this book.
This version has 681 line-level little tweaks. Three brand new chapters and six expanded scenes.
Some people have asked why I couldn't just update the book file on the retailers: this is an Amazon rule, not a Zoe devious plan, I promise. Amazon is hesitant to update files in general, only doing it if there has been an error corrected. (I did think, for a hot second, about pretending that three chapters were "missing", but they might read this blog and then that would be awkward)
And if a file is more than 10% different from the previous one, they won't allow it to be updated. I went back and forth with them to be sure that a second edition was the only option. More details on that below in the FAQ.
On a personal note, it’s a very strange thing, trying to revise a book one wrote a lifetime ago. A year after I wrote this book, my husband and I separated for six months. It was the beginning of a very strange, hard, and wonderful journey for us to find each other again. Life and art, forever entangled.
If you read this book in the first edition, I hope you find joy in the new words. If you are new to this series, welcome to Pine Harbour. I hope you stay a while.
~ Zoe
Frequently Asked Questions about the second edition
Q: Do I need to read this again? Does anything change?
A: The short answer is no. The story arc is almost exactly the same, and a majority of the scenes are relatively unchanged, although there are lot of sentence-level tweaks to tighten it. It runs into the next book in exactly the same way it did before.
Q: So what is different in this book?
A: I made these changes so new-to-the-series readers would have a reading experience in book one that matches latter reading experiences in terms of voice and depth of scene. What's different? Some scenes are longer. One scene, the Haunted Hay Ride, was split into two separate events to give the characters more time to progress through their feelings. And there are three new chapters as well, showing scenes that were previously rushed over in a summary line.
Q: Are the other books going to be re-released?
A: No. I'm going to re-cover them to match, and at the same time update the interior files with minor corrections, but nothing that will trigger the need for a second edition like this revision did.
Q: I like the old covers!
A: That's not a question.
Q: Can I still get the old covers?
A: Yes! Those books still exist in paperback, and will always exist in paperback. In ebook, the cover updates to whatever is most current, but if you want to build a keeper set of the covers, paperback is your best option. (As I release each new cover, a new paperback edition will be released, and I'll update my book pages with both links)