"an earlier issue" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to a certain issue that happened before another one. For example: "We had to address an earlier issue before we could move onto the next step".
When a modern, detailed map replaces an earlier issue, annual distribution can increase dramatically.
A reference to it in an earlier issue of The Times (Sept . 17 2000) gives its cost as $300 million.
Maybe, but Cassandra was rather intrigued by a letter in this week's Economist reacting to an article on the Danish tax in an earlier issue.
A subscription starts with the most recent issue; you can back-order an earlier issue, whose price will be included in the year's subscription, which consists of 12 issues.
In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals.
The new procedure was described in last week's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine and in an earlier issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Just try reading small text in poor light, or flicking through an early issue of Wired.
In an early issue, Isabel Toledo modelled homemade snoods: one crocheted, one made from a supermarket onion bag, one a Woolworth's hairnet, one fashioned from jockstraps.
Democrats made an early issue of adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, a measure they were confident Republicans would not accept as they designed it.
"I sent an early issue of Areté to Kundera and was out of the house when I got a phone call saying there was a letter at home with his name and address on the back.
The size of the game was an early issue.
