Question about rights for a revised story

It depends on so many variables that I can't give you a proper answer, I'm afraid.

Bearing in mind the outline you've provided, you could probably get away with changing a couple of things and putting your story out there again. But is it ethical or reasonable to do so?

If you took someone else's work and changed character names, adjusted the dialogue and changed a few descriptions, would that make it your own work? Nope.

So if making those changes can't transform someone else's work into yours, how can they change an old story of yours into a whole new one? In my opinion you'd need to change so much about the story for this to be a reasonable thing to do that you'd be better off just writing a whole new story to begin with.

Which isn't to say that you shouldn't rework your story: I've done that a lot, particularly with non-fiction. But I always made sure that the editors in question knew exactly what I was doing and were happy with it.

Being published does not always mean you can't sell first rights. You can sell any rights an editor is willing to buy. It's just this simple. Previously "published" is meaningless. No one bought first rights from you, so if an editor still wants to, he can.

The trick to all such questions is simple. Always be honest with editors, and let them make their own decisions.

Jamesaritchie said:

Always be honest with editors, and let them make their own decisions.

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This.