Yes, there are several reasons I did it this way. (I did a FAQ at my web site about order -- maybe I should add why I made the decision as I did?)

One, FIRES OF NUALA is actually Book One, as far at the time line goes. HIDDEN FIRES takes place ten years later. It stands alone pretty well, but it is currently the middle book. FIRE SANCTUARY takes place thousands of years later -- when FTL exists, the planet is a united republic with exec/kings (the Atare and Ragaree) who have authority, but do have an elected government to wrestle with.

FIRE SANCTUARY was my first book, and I had a fear that it needed some cleaning up, more than my health could handle at the time. Plus -- the ideas trickling through about another book are the sequel to HIDDEN FIRES (should enough of the older ones sell that I think there would be a demand for another Nuala book.) I also thought that in the current market, Darame and her quest might be more accessible to readers. (And that readers would forgive me for there being very little sex. Even if it had been allowed, there would not have been a lot, obviously, (no spoilers here...) but you know how the SFRs being written right now. A lot of them are great stories, but they also have a higher sex quotient. I had to fight back then to have a female main POV! The SF market was perceived as being dominated by male readers, and they didn't necessarily want a female POV. To me, that is so strange, because what could be more alien than the opposite sex?)

So, all that weighed out made me think that I would release FoN first. Glad you liked it!

At the current glut on the Internet, good reviews are valued. After you hit Goodreads with it, if you have time, take it over to Amazon -- books as old as mine rarely have reviews.

You're right, it's hard to get a lot of these older books back to print. You either have to pay someone to do it, or learn how to do it yourself -- and will it ever pay for the transfer, much less make money? I was fortunate -- I didn't have to scan or type in the book. I had saved them as ASCII files, at the suggestion of a tech-savvy friend, and always kept a floppy drive on a computer. A friend had a friend write a dozen lines of PERL, I think it was, and poof! A WORD doc! It needed a lot of cleaning up, plus correcting a style error I had back then, but otherwise, formatting the chapter headings and appendices was a bigger deal than the transfer.

And now I get to do it again, while trying to get this one in at Amazon, etc. Argh! ;^)

Glad you liked it!

Within the story little sex made total sense, also I read this more like a sf adventure than a romance and that's just fine.

I have this desire to make the relationships in my books sensual, not constantly sexual, if that makes sense. We'll see how that line of thought goes on....