[Apologies for any typos, I don’t edit these.]
Sitting here typing with a sore back. It was crippling last night and I barely slept. Managed to injure myself by digging a hole to bury a hen I lost last week, which feels very stupid. Ouch. Drugs and stretching seems to be easing it off though.
Last week
Last week was a weird one. I had two projects with editors and they took a wee bit longer than I expected, so it meant waiting. So it meant I actually had a week to do some data analysis. Crunching through my royalty statements for the last nine-and-a-half years of doing this was interesting. I could tell the story of my writing career in numbers and dates. When certain books came out and had a certain effect. It underpinned the strategy I’ve been pulling together and gives me hope and faith that it’ll work.
The results are starting to come through nicely — I’m constantly astonished that I haven’t saturated the market for my books and that I can still sell a healthy number every day of a book that’s almost ten years old and has over 500,000 sales and downloads. Crazy.
Also, I redid the covers to these books:
(I used to live around the corner from that bridge in Leith. I have a memory of driving across it in late 2000, but that could be wrong. Definitely walked across it.)
I also did the edits from James Mackay for the eighth Fenchurch, A HILL TO DIE ON, which is out 1st December, and in decent shape, I have to say. My ARC list will hopefully get it this week. It’ll be a relief to get that one finished, that’s for sure!
This week
Well, I’m hoping I get the copy edits for that back, which will be good. John Rickards does them and is kick ass.
And I also hope to get the edits back on my totally different project (I probably need codenames for that stuff). I did a 14,500 word outline for it and I’m getting it edited so I can get an idea of how commercial it is. It’s trying to hit a genre and I suspect, with distance, that I’ve made it too gritty for that genre, so I’ll need to do some reworking on it this week. I’m eager to write the book soon, to clean my palette from almost two years solid of writing British police procedurals. I’m so tired of it! (Relax, there’ll be more.)
Anyway, no read of this before it goes out, as ever, to make sure it does go out. Have a great week and stay safe
Cheers,
Ed