Version 2.0: Changes Are Afoot

The other day, Kelly and Joe over in our chat room mentioned to me that used copies of the first edition of Vegan Freak were going for something like $40 and up on Amazon.com. That’s flattering in one kind of way, and depressing in another. The flattering aspect is probably quite obvious. The depressing aspect, however, may not be.

Truth is, we’re not thrilled with the first edition of our book. Though we think there’s a lot in the book that’s worthwhile, our views and ideas have changed significantly in the last 4 years, and we are anxious to get the new version out. The latest version is, in many ways, a more knowledgeable and more interesting approach than the one we took back when we were more or less total n00bs writing the first edition. In the newest version, we concentrate not only on helping people to go vegan and stay vegan, but also on building a larger vegan movement that uses outreach and education as its main tools. We kept the irreverent and personal style of the first edition in many places, but we also get serious and analytical in places where that approach is better warranted. In short, this second edition is significantly better in many ways, and we think it’ll be a more effective book for people. In order to make it more effective, we had to rewrite it from the ground-up, and we’ve revised extensively throughout the process to bring the best possible work forward.

People will probably be surprised by how different the second edition is, but any writer who has a completely staid approach is a writer that’s probably not reading and thinking extensively enough. For some reason I’ll never get, people expect authors to have a wholly stable set of opinions that change little with time. It reminds me of how George W. Bush used to be so proud that he was so set in his opinions and approaches, and that he had “stayed the course” despite the many criticisms of his ideas and policies. Yes, George, you had a stable set of opinions, but that stable set of opinions was obviously the wrong stable set of opinions, and damn, did it ever fuck shit up (and that’s putting it generously).

To my thinking, any decent author has to have the intellectual fortitude to recognize that their previous work is the product of a particular time, place, sentiment, and set of understandings. Any author should throw everything they have into making the work the best they can within the boundaries of that context. But if it later turns out that the tools of that time were limited, there’s no reason to cling to them in the simplistic notion that not clinging to them will somehow make you a more consistent writer, or present a more consistent approach.

The work that we do is simply too important to approach any other way. When the publisher of the second edition came to us about a new version, they suggested that we rewrite 20% of the book. Our deal with them was that we’d do it only if we could rewrite the whole thing. In this latest version, we have indeed done that, and when the book is finally released, you’ll be reading a book that benefits from tighter and more entertaining writing while also taking a new approach to the subject matter that will motivate and hopefully inspire many to go vegan and stay vegan.