Michael's Blog – September 2013 Archive (4)

Made it! I finished the first draft last week: 98,000 words. I did promise myself I would have a break before beginning the read through and edit, but I started reading it a couple of days ago. Pat asked me this morning if I was pleased with what I had written and I found myself hesitating before I could answer. Does that mean I’m not happy with it? Who knows? I have to go with my instincts and my self-belief. In a TV interview (it can be seen on my website) I claimed that a writer should be…

I’ve reached 92,000 words of my next book and am getting close to my target of 100,000. With luck I should have my first draft finished by the end of the week. After that comes more hard work. And for any of you who read my blog and are thinking of writing a novel, simply because thousands of writers are at it now and publishing on Amazon, think carefully of what you’re letting yourself in for. Preparing any book means research, which can mean a great deal of writing and time spent before…

During the week I came across a post on one of the author websites that I visit every day in which the lady author stated that she had published five novels during 2012. I can’t remember if she claimed to have written five novels in that time, but the fact that five of her books went live during that time got me thinking: what has Amazon led us into? Once upon a time it would have been a work of supreme effort to achieve that, but now it seems a common occurrence among some of the writing…

Another month begins and I hope to make more progress with my sales and with the word count for my current mss. Although my book sales are not meteoric, I have seen the increased figures for August published on Novel Rank (not entirely accurate), which is always good to see, and I have increased my word count to 76000 words. If both those figures remain on an upward trend, I should get past the one hundred for sales and reach 100,000 word count by the end of the month. But when things are…