Getting Started with Myth Retellings in Modern Publishing
I spent about three years helping a small press figure out how to publish myth retellings after they lost their rights to a major catalog due to a licensing dispute. The short version is that C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces has become one of the most requested public domain adjacent titles, and the market has gotten crowded to the point where just picking up the book and assuming it will sell on reputation alone doesn't work anymore. Here is what I actually learned from watching several projects succeed and fail. The 1956 novel is still under copyright in the United States until 2051. Lewis died in 1963, and the rule is life plus 70 years. This means any self-published edition, annotated version, or adaptation requires licensing through the Lewis estate, which is administered by HarperCollins. I found this out the hard way when a friend's Kickstarter for a "retold" illustrated version got a cease-and-desist before the first copy was printed. The estate is unusually aggressive about enforcement compared to most other estates. What people usually mean when they say they want to work with Till We Have Faces is the underlying myth of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's The Golden Ass. That source text, translated by various authors over the past century, sits in the public domain. You can freely publish your own translation of Apuleius, and you can freely write a story inspired by those characters. You cannot, however, use Lewis's specific retelling as your base text without permission. The line between adaptation and inspiration is where most disputes happen.
I recommend starting with a public domain source if your goal is independent publication. The Apuleius text has been translated by many people, and versions by M. J. Edwards, Sir Thomas Keightley, and Walter C. Greene are all in the public domain in the US. You can read these at sites like Project Gutenberg or Perseus Digital Library at no cost. Pick a translation that matches the tone you want, then read it alongside Lewis's novel if you want to understand how a professional handled the same material. The differences between Lewis's version and Apuleius's original are significant. Lewis adds internal monologue for Orual, changes the theological framework, and reframes the entire story as a complaint against the gods rather than a straightforward romance. Here is the part nobody tells you about myth retellings: the market is saturated with romanticized versions of Cupid and Psyche. Amazon Kindle Unlimited has thousands of them. If you are writing a retelling, you need a clear differentiator that goes beyond changing the ending or making Psyche the point-of-view character. I worked with an author who tried a gender-flipped version where Orual is the protagonist but kept the same plot beats as Lewis, and it sold fewer than 200 copies in its first year. The readers who wanted that version were already reading Lewis. What actually moved units were versions that took the structural skeleton and relocated it into a completely different setting, or versions that treated the gods as literal psychological projections rather than divine beings. If you want to publish an edition that references Lewis's text directly, you need to contact the literary executor. The process takes about four to six months from initial inquiry to signed agreement, and the fees depend on whether you are doing a scholarly edition, a commercial reprint, or an adapted work. For a small press run of 2,000 to 5,000 copies, expect to pay between two thousand and five thousand dollars as an advance against royalties. I have seen some authors skip this step and just claim their work is an independent retelling, but distributors like Amazon KDP have started using AI-assisted similarity detection, and flagged editions get removed within days of upload. It is not worth the risk.
The practical workaround I ended up using with my client was to write a companion guide that discussed Lewis's treatment of the myth without reproducing any of his text. We quoted short passages under fair use, provided analysis, and published it as a standalone non-fiction work. That approach avoided licensing entirely and actually performed better because it targeted a different buyer demographic, people looking for literary analysis rather than another romance retelling. The book sold about eight hundred copies in its first six months, which was nowhere near the marketing budget we had hoped for, but it was clean and legally sound. If you are looking for the text itself rather than looking to publish around it, you can find free PDFs of The Golden Ass translations on Project Gutenberg, and you can purchase Till We Have Faces from any major bookseller. There is no legal way to get a free PDF of Lewis's novel right now. Some shadow library sites host it, but downloading from those carries its own risks, and supporting the estate through legitimate channels is the only path if you ever plan to reference the work in a published project.
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