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.

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!

Tapas - Episodic Publishing

I've been reading stuff on tapas.io for more than a year now, initially because that's the main place to see the latest episode of Heartstopper. Once there, I found plenty of other stuff to read my way through and I'm now hooked on "Through My Eyes" and "Soft Touch" among many others both novels and comics.

I'm not entirely sure that my work will work well in an episodic form that goes with such a sight, but I'm giving it a go and the first chapter of "Out of My Shell" is going online in the next couple of days.

I'm taking a slightly different route than the one normally used on the Tapas site. I'm going to publish a chapter every week, but they are all going to be free to read, always. Anybody who wants to read ahead or support me can simply go to Amazon and get the Kindle or printed versions that will be available right from the start. To that end, there's a new link in the menu above, that will always have my up-to-date list of published novels on Amazon.

Let's see how this hybrid model of publishing and promotion works out.

Self Publishing Choices

There seem to be more and more choices when it comes to self-publishing appearing all the time. I thought I'd give a bit of an opinion on my own experiences with just a few of them.

Blurb.com

This is the company that I've used the most, using them to print and then publish my large-format travel books for almost twenty years. The quality is amazing, the printing times are short and the service, if you ever have an issue, is second-to-none. They offer excellent software with their own Bookwright and a range of templates and plug-ins for Adobe products. You do, however, pay for the quality and the support with relatively expensive per-page and per-book rates. Distribution seems to work well, but coverage is spotty.

Lulu.com

I moved towards Lulu to start to publish more readable paperbacks. The pricing was one of the major factors in the decision. Print quality is good, turn-around is reasonable and document preparation is fairly painless. Simply producing a final PDF file from a word document is enough for the interior and then you just add a cover from the calculated sizes provided. If you choose to use distribution, you can set a retail price and your book appears on Amazon and other bookshops across the world. By more modern competitive standards, the prices are somewhere in the middle and distribution costs push the final retail price, even for a simple paperback, quite high.

Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing)

I'm still very new to this one, even though I signed up several years ago. I've now published my first novel using this service and it's been a pretty polished experience so far. It's too early to tell how well sales are managed, but the rest of the process is pretty much flawless. They encourage you to make your book available in all three formats, Kindle, Paperback and Hardback. This is made as simple and painless as possible with a mixture of their own software for Kindle publishing and simple PDF uploads for everything else. Print prices, despite upcoming increases, are the cheapest I've seen and turn-around times are fast.

Distribution and management is simple, they even allow you to pull together work published elsewhere. You can take advantage of their Kindle Unlimited reading program if you wish and they don't stop you publishing elsewhere. They even offer cost-priced author purchases.

Quality Comparisons

Here are the two proof copies of my first novel. The Amazon one is on the left, with the proof bar across it. Sizing issues with the cover are my fault. There really isn't much to tell between them, when it comes to the process and the quality of the final product.

Here are the insides, Amazon on top and Lulu below. I actually prefer the Amazon output just a tiny bit. The graphical header is slightly darker and more defined, but again there's very little to tell between the two, particularly in a photo. Paper quality is similar for both, a little thin, but acceptable for an inexpensive product. In both cases, the reproduction of my original file is pretty much spot-on. Text is clear and very readable for both.

My Recommendation

Well, unless you have an aversion to the Bezos Empire, then I think I'd go with Amazon from now on. I'm toying with the idea of a colour project for release at the end of the summer. Maybe then will be a good time to revisit this subject and take a closer look at the quality and the experience. 

Proofs and Proofing

I tend to write at a breakneck pace, 10,000 words a day isn't out of the question. Inevitably, I make a lot of mistakes when charging along and this leads to many proof reading passes, alterations, expansions and changes. Then everything has to be proofed again.

I'm still very new to this and I've got to define and develop my own strategies as I migrate from journals and memoirs to fiction. Talking to a friend, more qualified that I'll ever be, I decided that I would be sensible to take a break from the endless rounds of re-reads and then come back to the manuscript with a fresher eye.

Out of My Shell Cover Proof

The solution? Start a second novel and work on that one for a while. Once at a similar stage of near-completion, switch back to the first novel and take a fresh look. I might even feel the need to start a third one, as my head is full of possibilities.

I'm still finding it hard to make the plot dramatic enough, or at least I think so, but I like a gentle slice-of-life story and it doesn't worry me too much. Not everybody needs drama and crisis in a book. The thread that binds the two novels together so far is my subconscious need to make them deeply, sensually, graphically erotic.

Hard-wired for Love Cover Proof

So, two very different potential novels in different stages of the process are keeping me busy when work takes a break. As you can also see, I take the time to work on the covers, finalize the layout and begin to navigate the intricacies of Kindle Direct Publishing. I'm sticking with Lulu for the printing and paper publishing, at least for the short term, but I'm happy to get Kindle eBook stuff sorted direct with Amazon.

The Writing Bug

 A Growing Addiction

Writing is one of those things that, for me at least, is highly addictive. When I first started writing about my travels, I would work feverishly to complete the text select the photographs as quickly as possible after my return.

Now, as the text for a typical trip has expanded to be anything up to 15,000 words, I find that I have to write it as I go. Or, at least write a first draft while it is fresh in my memory. I take my laptop and spend the hot African afternoons in the shade, writing a few hundred or, at most a few thousand words about the adventures of the day. When I return home, I read through this and make whatever corrections and changes that i feel it needs to be more coherent.

The thing is, though, once I'm finished, I'm left with this urge to write something else. Normally, I can push back against the urge and, after a few days it works out of my system and I can get on with other, more mundane everyday tasks. This year, however, I have not been able to do this.

Words, Words and More Words

Since I returned from Tanzania at the end of February, I've simply kept on writing, probably about 100,000 words so far, with no end in sight. I've written the book about my trip, both the coffee-table photobook and a smaller paperback version - they are both now published and available worldwide.

I've also written 'A Slice of Love', a deeply personal, frank, honest and explicit snapshot of probably the most important part of my life. I wrote it for myself, as a form of therapy, to help my ongoing need to rationalize and compartmentalize my thoughts and feelings. I couldn't settle until I had completed it, cover and all and had ordered a copy for myself. There will only ever be a single copy. I'll never order another and this one will stay in my publishing cabinet for the rest of my life. If someone happens to read it after I am gone, I think that'll be fine. The other person the book concerns will hopefully forgive me for my hubris and candour. I might tell him that I've written it when I next see him, giving him the option to have it left to him in my will.

I'm still not finished writing though. I'm trying to get out of my head that novel that I always thought I might have buried in there somewhere. It's a bit more difficult than biography - actually, a lot more difficult - and there might be still too much of me in it. It also might be a bit too graphically, erotically, explicitly gay, which limits any potential audience severely.

Whatever, I'm not stopping now and, If I don't like it at the end, I'll simply try again in a different genre. I've found something that I can do whenever I feel like it. I can pick up at any time and let go when I've had enough. It's equally taxing and relaxing and I think I love it.

That Published Feeling

Amazon.co.uk Screenshot

There really isn't anything quite like typing your own name into Amazon's search box and seeing your latest book appear, ready for purchase and available for immediate despatch. In many ways, it is confirmation - if any was needed - that the self-publishing options now available to anyone really do work.

Now the ISBN has propagated, and the book is in global distribution, it should be possible for anyone, anywhere in the world to buy a copy. If you're local and would like a copy, send me a message, as I can offer a healthy discount when Amazon are cut out of the chain!

Much more importantly, if you want help with publishing your own work, then I can help with that too. Whether you're writing a novel, a cookery book or a coffee-table artwork, why not get in touch and let someone else help to take the strain.

Paperback Now Available

The second, and now final proof for the paperback version of my 2023 Tanzania Safari book has arrived and been thoroughly checked. Everything seems to be in order, so I am happy to announce that it is now available. Initially, it will only be visible on Lulu.com, but I've pushed the button for global distribution which means it should soon be available to purchase through your favourite bookstore - online or high-street - anywhere in the world.

The paperback book cover

It is 78 pages and contains dozens of black & white photos taken during the safari. I'm ordering a bunch to give to friends and family, so you may get lucky.

Coffee Table Book Now Available

I've just received the second proof copy of To Endure is To Enjoy? and I'm now happy that I've squashed all the text errors and fixed the cover photo.

To Endure is To Enjoy

By David Kinrade

As always, these big (13" x 11") coffee-table sized books are expensive and I don't ever expect to sell many - if any - of them. I have ordered a couple for customers already, and managed to take advantage of a good blurb.com discount coupon for them.

Lulu.com have been much slower with the first proof for the paperback. I'll keep everyone posted if as that gets sorted over the next few weeks.

Such a Long Time

 It's been so long since I had anything to say about publishing that I'd almost forgotten that the Pride Pride website even exists. It is nice to get back from another adventure and to finally have new words and pictures to put into print.

First up is the cover for the latest coffee-table book that details my recent trip to Tanzania. It is in final draft at the moment and the copy should be with me in a few days to check over. As you can see from the front cover, the leopard sighting was truly spectacular.

This time around, there is going to be a proper published paperback. The paperback has the same text as the coffee-table book, just a different selection of photos and those being in black & white. I'm waiting for the first proof to arrive, but the second draft is ready to go once that arrives and this one will, as usual be published and available online globally through lulu and global distribution.

Final Previews and Versions

I had a busy morning uploading the final text for the new book today. There were, once again, many more errors and corrections to be made. I changed a few sentences to read better and have now fixed as many corrections as I could find in a couple of readings

As I mentioned before, I was conscious of the inevitable high price that a book with images in it was going to have. Distribution through lulu.com is a bit convoluted and they have minimum pricing that assures a fixed percentage to the channel retailers. Clearly, it can be much better for me to sell either directly from a local outlet, or directly through lulu as an on-demand thing, but I like the idea of having my books available to everyone.

Sadly, the final retail price of the illustrated book is going to be £34.40. I have, therefore, also made a text-only version that I'm also waiting for a final proof copy of. This will retail for a more reasonable £16.40. Both version should be available in about two weeks.

As soon as I get that sorted out, I'll push a copy out to the e-book channels as well, for as low a price as possible.