The holidays hit hard and didn’t stop this year, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. I spent almost all of my “author time” these last few months writing, and virtually none of it on editing or marketing. As a result, I now have three complete novels in three different series that still need to be edited before release. These are as follows:
Children of the Wastes
Driftmetal V
Warcaster
Children is LONG and is going to take roughly 6-8 weeks to edit. The fifth and final Driftmetal novel is the longest of that series yet, but those usually only take me a week or two to do edits and read-throughs. Warcaster is the first of a planned trilogy, which I’m going to write to completion before releasing the first book. The magic system in that series plays a crucial role in the story line, so I want to make sure it’s consistent between books, among other particularities. That one will stay on the shelf for the next three months or so.
As far as sales for November and December, things settled into what has become their usual non-release-month troughs. Which for me right now means roughly two books per day. Case in point, I sold 59 books in November and 60 books in December. That’s just on Amazon and doesn’t include print sales from Createspace or ebook sales from Smashwords and its subsidiary platforms, of which there were another handful or two.
Overall, I’m happy with my progress this past year. According to my calculations *pushes up glasses*, I wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 507,000 words in 2015. That’s while working a full-time job, spending an exorbitant amount of time with my wife (every second of which I loved), and being involved in all the various extracurricular activities I enjoy – church, music, gaming, etc. That comes out to 1,389 words every day, week-in and week-out. I hereby declare myself proud of… myself.
My sales are more than I could’ve asked for. All the books I’ve released so far are in crossover genres that are hard to place and hard for readers to pin down, so the fact that they’ve generated any interest at all is huge for me. Given that I’ve been self-publishing for about a year and two months now, and that I sold virtually nothing for the first half of that, a couple hundred bucks a month is an encouraging norm to adjust to.
As always, thanks for reading and best of luck to you in all your endeavors throughout the new year!