You run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking

Inside Ed’s Head 2023-03-27

Music

Don’t know why, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Pink Floyd recently. This one goes in because it’s got all those noisy clocks ringing out. And the clocks have just changed this weekend. I really hope they stop that nonsense. British Summer Time forever, please! Speaking of time passing, there’s a fiftieth anniversary remaster of the Dark Side of the Moon (the album this is from) out just now...

Last Week

I aimed for clearing 50k and possibly getting over 60k. How did I do? Let’s look at the Blue Peter totaliser, shall we?

That’s a screenshot from Scrivener, the app I use to outline and write my books.

I would’ve scraped over the line had I not had to take an ailing vet to the hens. I mean, ailing hen to the vets. I’ve had over 60 hens in about 15 years and six months to a year is a good time to have them, but that one lasted over four years – five is an incredible age for an farmed hen. There are another two plus Zlatan the rooster and one of them is still laying!

So, that’s a really solid work week. I’ve got myself into a nice groove with it, where I’m doing a tick-tock (not a TikTok!) of stuff, where one day will be heavy on the editing and light on the writing, then the next will invert that. It’s getting through the book at a decent clip. I’m slightly worried I repeat myself a lot in the 30-50% space so I’ll prune that back when I edit it. Otherwise, it’s good, I think. I like it. I’m doing stuff I wouldn’t otherwise with these books. They’re mostly Marshall’s POV, but there are others in here. The stuff I wrote today was from from DI Elliot’s POV and then from a villain, which let me unleash some Fargo TV series style stuff. Probably won’t read like that but it’s where I was coming from it, that mixture of dark comedy and brutal tragedy. There’s another chapter in a similar vein, which I edited this morning, and has that sweet juxtaposition between tragedy and comedy. I hope I don’t mess these bits up and they achieve the desired outcome, which is making you lot feel.

That’s pretty much all I achieved, really. Uploaded the Dodds books to BookVault so they’re available to buy in paperback. I’m needing to have a little think about the store as the delivery price is quite high – working on the assumption everyone has Prime, then it’s still maybe cheaper to buy on Amazon, unless you buy two books, in which case it isn’t. Maybe it’ll work better for ebooks! Anyway. It’s an experiment and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Next Week

Just more writing, I’m afraid. Into that groove. Deep into it. I’ll hopefully get through another 20k and take me up to 80k, which is most of the way there. I’m enjoying doing it, which is more than I can say about all of the books I’ve written. I feel very much in control of these and I’m sort of conjuring them rather than creating. It’s an odd distinction and probably sounds very w4nky, but it feels like all of these characters exist and I’m talking to them as opposed to creating them, like Fenchurch say. Anyway, those lovely men in white coats are here...

Question time!

I had this question in the comments last week:

Out of curiosity what percentage of your sales are paper v ebooks?

I checked my data and it’s less than 1%. My audio numbers is currently 0.5%, for context, but I expect that to greatly overtake print this year. 63% of the total is ebook sales and 35% is ebook loans on Kindle Unlimited. Hope that's interesting to you. Let me know if you’ve got any other questions and I’ll answer them!

Have a great week! I might go and write that extra chapter now…

Cheers,
Ed