2024 - A Busy Year

One look at the posts on this blog - and apologies for their infrequent nature - will tell the casual observer that I've had a busy year from a writing and publishing perspective.

What began as a paperback, publishable version of my tenth travel book - Victoria Africa's Great Lake - turned into a project that served two very different but related purposes. I'm finally able to make all ten of my travel books available on Amazon in paperback form and I learned a great deal about using Affinity Publisher to good effect by using it to make the conversions and do all the publishing.

Always one for genre-busting, my novels this year are an eclectic mix of travel-romance, sci-fi and fantasy-adventure. I seem to finally have broken out of the 50K-word rut that I had initially been stuck in, finding last year's Another Horizon quite liberating. While The Lion Sleeps remains around that mark, both Another World and Flame of the West are over 100K-words in length.

All three have been published on Amazon, both in real and Kindle format, but in many ways this is a secondary outlet for my work. I'm now happy to see all of my novels being read and enjoyed in their episodic form on Tapas.io. Getting a few hundred chapter-reads per week is quite gratifying.

So, a big year with lots of writing. If we count the next novel - that I've been working on for about a month now, then I'm at around 330,000 words for the year, 320,000 of them being fiction. It's not quite 1000 words a day, so that's something to aim for for the coming year.

Design and Print

I'd been asked to keep this one secret for a bit - giving the author time to get it out there and also get copies to friends and families. Now that a month has passed, it's time to let everyone see what we managed to create and publish.

It's not a complex project, by any means, but it has taken more than a year to get it finished. That's been a combination of many different delays, changes, proofing issues and simply a lack of time. I'm actually very happy with the way that it has finally turned out. The printers have done an excellent job of reproducing the images in very high quality and it really is stunning in person.

Here are a couple of spreads from inside, to give a brief glimpse into the finished product.

With such a relatively small page count, it might seem like this should be a quick process, but there are many things to consider when working on a photo book and the artist had very particular requirements regarding the layout, the numbering and the overall feel of the final product.

Latest Novel - Flame of the West

 

It's time for another Novel publishing announcement. Flame of the west is a heroic action/fantasy novel full of fighting, magic and sex. My novels are generally getting longer and more narrative, this one being around 100K words. I'm actually quite proud of this one, even if I still struggle to get enough drama into the story.

As always, it is available from Amazon in hardback, paperback and Kindle editions. I've also started this one as a bi-weekly serial on TAPAS.IO.

Find out more on the NOVELS page

New Novels Publishing Now

 

There can be big gaps between books being published, but sometimes, the way I work brings two at once.

So, The Lion Sleeps and Another World are now becoming available on Amazon, Kindle versions first, followed by the other versions in the next few days. The Lion Sleeps will also appear on Lulu from Wednesday August 7th.

See the Novels page for details and links.

Easier than Expected

In my last post, I discussed the start of my efforts to re-size and re-factor my travel books into a smaller and more manageable format that would be both less expensive and more readily available on Amazon. In short, and just a couple of weeks later, this has proven to be easier than I anticipated. All nine books have been converted and everything seems to work out just fine.

I think I actually work in such a way that this is quite an easy project for me. When I make each new book, I simply collect possible images and draw them into the book as I go, often making them fit in with the written narrative. This means that I always have that selection of images available if I ever need them again. I also have the original Blurb-published master files and PDF copies available to reference and re-use as necessary.

It's also finally made me make real use of some of the Affinity software that I've ignored for years. Affinity Publisher is really very good - if a bit memory hungry when outputting PDF files. It has a few quirks, but I'm learning to deal with them and the interface and speed of use is pretty impressive. As mentioned in that prior post, however, I think I need another 32GB of memory for my system.

I've only managed to get a proof back from Amazon for the first volume that I tackled - Waiting for Water. Overall, I'm really delighted with the quality of the photographs and the overall format of the book. I've decided to wait until volume ten, as yet untitled, is ready and then I'm going to release them all in rapid sequence. Prices are likely to range from£30 to £40 on the Amazon UK store and relative world-wide.

Mixing Things Up

If you take a look at the link above to PHOTO BOOKS then you can see details of the nine travel books that I have done over the years - one for each of my trips to Africa. I love them, mostly because there is something very special about having a hefty 13" x 11" hardback to hold and enjoy.

The biggest downside of them, however, has always been the considerable cost of buying a copy. Obviously, I can get them at cost, but to retail them through Blurb.com results in a cost that is sometimes in excess of £100 per book. If you just want a copy for yourself, then this is quite a considerable outlay and one that I didn't ever expect anyone to make. I have, however, managed to sell a few copies of some of them over the years and this is delightful.

However, I've often wanted to do something about it and now I'm trying to. I have started making my first conversion of one of these books to a smaller and more cost-conscious format. I'm so happy with Amazon's printing of my recent small mammal books that I'm going to convert these larger books down. The first one is nearly ready now and I've settled on an 8" x 10" page size for this series. I'm not tackling them in any particular order, but the first one happens to be the biggest one - Waiting for Water.

Having to change the shape and size of the pages is a challenge. Each subsequent volume is becoming a little easier. I have a routine and system now that makes it about as easy as possible, but it is not a quick process. I'm going to concentrate on getting the conversions made and then go for a staggered publishing sequence once I return from trip ten. It also looks like I will have to get some more RAM for the new desktop computer. I thought 32GB was plenty, but Affinity Publisher is a hungry beast and I'm finding I'm getting low on resources when working with a 200+ page book.

The images show the same pair of pages in both formats, old above and new below at more-or-less the same sizes.

Publishing Updates

I guess I need to apologise. Firstly to my readers and secondly to myself. I just forget to do things in the right order sometimes.

This time I managed to publish a whole set of books on Amazon without actually properly posting here about them. I even created the page on this site to showcase them and promptly forgot to make a post about that as well.

So, take a look at the link to Shorts above and see what I've been up to. I'm loving this 8.5-inch square format for Amazon, but I do wish that they would do slightly bigger, even when I can understand the limitations that they are working to. The full-colour printing is really very nice and the price is basically impossible to match anywhere. I've a few more ideas for shorts like these, so I'll try and keep them coming. I'm only making them available as paperbacks for now. The photo-heavy nature of them doesn't really suit kindle.

In other news, I've finally completed my latest novel. This one has taken a long time to get there, but I am reasonably happy with it. It is a sequel of sorts to Hard-wired for Love and follows on about 300 years after that novel finishes. At very nearly 82,000 words, Another Horizon is the longest thing I have ever written by far and it might suffer a little for this, but if you get to enjoy the first novel, then maybe give this a try as well.

Take a look at the Novels page above to find out more and link to availability on Amazon. Kindle edition is always first, followed by paperback and hardback once I've checked a printer's proof copy.

I seem to have the bug again - it must be something to do with the time off over Christmas and New Year. The third novel in this sequence has already been started and I'm feeling good to keep up the momentum!