Last Month
Been a busy month, as is more common for me so here’s the bullet list:
- Hand wrote approx 5k of Shattered
- Typed approx 20k (Including emails and blogs)
- Spent 10 hours working for red feather
- Spent 5 hours working for Flight
- Spent approx 20 hours doing marketing and promotion
- Read for about 50 hours
- Sent 49 emails
I’ve not communicated much with other people this month via emails but have done a heck of a lot via social networks so the email count is deceptively low. I guess that may be the way things are heading as I get more and more of my promotion from the social networks as well.
Sales are still reasonably strong and beat last month but unfortunately didn’t double May’s sales last year. I did have an extroardinarily good May last year though and did a lot less promoting this month than I’d normally try and do.
My time ended up being focused on the edits for Chains of Freedom. As you can see from my progress bars to the right, the edit is now finished and my lovely proofers are just taking a quick look at that for me. I am expecting to go for a release date around June 20th so really not long now for that book but I’ll post more about that in a few days.
I also got stuck into my research for novel 4 which I’m calling Shattered for now and even managed to get started on the writing side of things.
This Month I’m hoping to, obviously get Chains published, and also focus a little more on promotion again. I slacked off last month a bit and my sales began to feel the affect so I’d like to reverse that a little. A new book should help with that, however. New books always build a little hype and remind people I’m still here.
Other then that I just really want to get writing the next book. I originally set myself the target of 100k words by the end of June this year but I’ve only written approximately 60k this year so 40k is what I’ve got left to try and chip away at. I don’t think I’ll manage quite that much but I’d like to write about 25k and then write a fair bit in July too to catch up and with the 50k minimum I write in November I should hopefully get close to the 200k I’d like by the end of the year.
This month I’ve also got a fair bit of time off planned. I’ve got the jubilee weekend camping in dartmoor, which is my kind of fun. I think I should totally get up to something Sherlock related while there. I also have the last week of June and the first week of July off in the two week holiday I am meant to take each summer. This is usually the only time of year I actually take time off from everything so I’m camping in Cornwall to watch the j class boat regatta in falmouth for the first week and then exploring some of the south coast in the second week.
While I say I’m going to be taking time off if it’s anything like last years holiday I’m sure I’ll find some old tall ship or something else that I can snoop around for research purposes and I’ll be doing a lot of reading I’m sure. I’ve already begun stocking my kindle with lovely things to read.