For me the highlight of 2018 was finally seeing A call to arms published. I first started working on this 4 years ago and after a rapid start progress all but ground to a halt making me wonder if it would ever get finished and published. But i stuck to it, even when it began to feel like walking through treacle with diver’s boots on and finally just before Christmas it was published in both paperback and on Kindle.
A couple of weeks before that we decided to republish and relaunch the Chronicles of Arkadia series with shiny new covers and I have to say that I’m thrilled with how they turned out leading to a brief but enjoyable spike in sales as a result.
Although it didn’t feel like it at the time that was the easy part and now begins the long marketing and publicity campaign to get all 5 books out there. Sadly, with Amazon’s new rules regarding the criteria for being able to leave a review, reviews are very hard to come by making it look like a fledgling book isn’t selling at all which doesn’t help. All I and other authors can do is encourage people to leave reviews wherever they can on other platforms perhaps such as Goodreads.
I also managed to write 7 or 8 new short stories last year, paltry in comparison to what I used to turn out but a giant step of progress when compared to recent years. A couple of them got shortlisted in the competitions for which they were entered but most flopped, which is to be expected after so long out of the saddle I guess and one is still entered into a competition the results for which are due at the end of this month.
As for my writing ambitions this year – well we’ll have to wait and see. I am halfway through my World War One historical novel which has been waiting in the wings for completion even longer than A call to arms, but I am also keen to crack on with book 2 in the Fractured Kingdom series. I am also looking into whether I have enough quality unpublished short stories to consider publishing another anthology.
Well I’d better leave it there or another week will pass me by, but as you can see I hope to be more productive this year in terms of my writing.
Please continue to keep dropping by for more updates.