Tuesday, 31 December 2024

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.