The Publishing Update

I think I let this one get away from me again. I can't believe that it has been almost a year since i last posted about a new book. I actually updated one on the NOVELS page in the meantime, but totally forgot to write a post about it. Let's put that right now and bring things up-to-date.

Emerald of the East

The Emerald of the East is the third novel in what will eventually be a quadrilogy. It continues the story of Jamie and Alex as they battle against the erratic powers of the four compass jewels. At almost 140,000 words, it's the longest novel I have written so far and I'm afraid that it rambles a bit at times. It also took quite a while to write and, apparently, even longer to write about.

Faster Than Light

Faster than Light is a very different proposition. Firstly, it is a stand-alone romance novel set in the here and now. Secondly, it's only just been completed and published on Amazon.

When I'm ready to release it, episodic publishing will be on my new platform of choice - Wattpad - and published in full at one time, a model I intend to use going forward. It sparked into existence only a month ago and at 64,000 words it's the fastest I've ever written. It was a story that, as soon as I started to write, I wanted to see it to the end and I'm fairly happy with it now.

In Other News

I'm working on another project, something that's a little more mainstream than the X-rated content of my normal work. It's intended to be a series of novels that should be read in sequence and tell a science fiction story of conflict and redemption across a swath of the galaxy. Tentatively titled The Pikun Wars, I've written three volumes so far and am working on the fourth. There will probably be a fifth and I hope to have it ready by the end of the year. Already at 240,000 words, it's going to be epic.

Here's a teaser of the cover for volume one.

Publishing Platforms

 

I first found Tapas and decided to use it as a publishing location in June of 2023. In the time since, I've published 12 works there - along with publishing them on Amazon - and had almost forty thousand chapters read by hundreds of readers.

I've never been a big enough author to make anything out of it, but I'm honestly not int he business of writing to make any money. It keeps me sane and gives me something to do to keep my brain active between work calls. There is a pleasure in declaring an income from my writing on my Tax return, but we're hardly ever going to get too excited over a sum that's barely into double digits.

Almost more than writing, I love to read on Tapas. I check for new stories every day and keep up with all my favourite long-term comics and series. It's not the only such site and that's probably a good thing.

Now, however, Tapas seems to be closing for good. Their Korean parent company have decided to cut their losses and the site will almost certainly be shuttered before the end of the year. If it is losing as much money as they suggest int he online reporting about the matter, I can't say that I blame them.

It does, however, leave me needing to change the home of my online works. I read almost as much on Wattpad as I do on Tapas and that's the one I've settled upon. Over the next week or two, I'll migrate all my published titles to Wattpad and see how it goes. Indeed, I've already migrated two titles, as much to test the system as to make an honest start. Pages on this blog will have the links added as they are moved and I'll delete the Tapas links when they die.

You'll find the index to these titles HERE.

Targets and Milestones

Back at the start of December, my previous post detailed my desire to write the equivalent of 1,000 words a day during a year. Hidden in that post was the fact that I was approaching a million words written in total across all my different books, both factual and fiction. Indeed, 948,000 words according to the count in Microsoft Word.

I'd also suggested that I might get somewhere around 250,000 for the 2025 year at the end. Those few quiet days spent here in the flat over the festive period actually managed to lift this total up to 272,000. This is a total that I was actually delighted with, all things considered.

I'm also very pleased with the fact that I've managed to complete the entirety of The Leopard Watches in basically three months. Well, the file timestamp tells me it was created on 24th of September, so around 100 days from start to finish. I'm really not trying to race through anything, but it shows I was consistently doing 700-800 words for the period.

Even more interesting is that I've kept going. Actually, I've accelerated. Emerald of the East was created on the 3rd of January. That's 18,650 words in just eleven days. Keep that up for a year and I'll do half-a-million!

And the point of all this? Well, there are actually two points that I want to mention.

Firstly, apparently, targets do keep me motivated. I made a post about needing to be more active with my writing and this seems to have allowed me to get right back into it.

Secondly, my "lifetime" total has clicked over the 1,000,000 words written mark. It's a personal milestone, to be sure, but I'm still glad that I've done it.

Unattainable Targets - Pushing On

I've always felt that I work better when I have a target or goal to work towards. I'm pretty sure this is the case for many people. We need some form of motivation to get anything meaningful done. This is definitely the case when it comes to my writing. However much I might have a desire to tell another story, I most-often simply don't have any motivation to just get on with it.

So, when I reached that point, in 2023, where I was getting tired of writing my books about my journeys to Africa and the whole premise of writing non-fiction purely for my own pleasure, I took an early decision to set a target for myself. I'd no idea at the time whether it was a reasonable target or not, but it was something that seemed like a good idea.

So, that target was to write 1,000 words a day. Not exactly 1,000 words every day, not even some words every day, but a target that I could keep in mind and check as I went along. Let's think of it more as a goal of 360,000 words a year - a third of a million in round numbers.

Well, as you can see from this spreadsheet, I'm not exactly smashing it. Still, for a couple of years it has kept me in that 300,000 word per year zone that I'm really pleased with.

As for 2025? Not so much.

This year has been difficult. Losing Dad was harder than it appeared. There's been the total upheaval of moving house and a bit more stress about it than I may have hitherto admitted.  Then there was our Trip to India. It was worth the effort to get those tiger photos that I have wanted for so many years, but I found it very difficult and exhausting. I did write most of 51 Frames during the trip, but didn't find the time or the inclination to write much of anything else, causing me to fall behind on my novels at the time.

Even so, Star of the North and Another Star were both finally completed this year and I'm working on that next one with a reasonable amount of commitment. Having concentrated on two sequels, it is nice to be writing a completely stand-alone story that allows a change of focus.

With just a month to go until the end of the year, I know that I'm not going to make it to anywhere near 300,000 words. - I'll do well to get above 250,000 I think. Still, I can use that total figure at the bottom to push on and try and make it to 1,000,000 words in total, can't I?

All the titles shown above are available online in one form or several. Most are available in serialised formats on tapas.io and most in hardback, paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon.

New Novels

With all the upheaval of moving house for the first time in almost forty years, my writing has slowed down a little this year. Added to this is my seeming lack of motivation to update this blog or my personal one.

These are all things that can be fixed, however and I'm now writing steadily again and working on new things all the time. Indeed, my global total for all my work is fast approaching a million words.

Today, however, I have to belated announcements of new novels. Both have been added to the appropriate page, with links to either Amazon and/or Tapas as appropriate. You always have the choice. Buy it for Kindle or in paperback or hardback if you want a real book. Get it for free on Tapas if you're prepared to have an episode every week.

The link to the Novels list is HERE

First 2025 Publication

 I'm pleased to announce that I've completed my Indian Trip Report publishing. It is now available on amazon in paperback form, with the hardback option hopefully coming very soon.

The title refers to my very first tiger sighting and the realization that getting a picture of a tiger is much harder than any mammal I've tried to photograph before.

If you'd like to look at getting a copy, follow this link AMAZON

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.