My Writing Week: Issue 2, Year 5


Hi all,

As a personal stand against the ebook price race to the bottom, I made a resolution at the start of last year to only purchase ebooks priced over $5. Here is what I ended up downloading:

WTF, an anthology by Pink Narcissus Press, $8.99
Marketing for Authors by Anita Revel, $4.97
The Last Albatross by Ian Irvine, $6.99
Oxygen by John Olson and Randy Ingermanson, 0.99
Turing Evolved by Dave Kitson, free
My Name in Lights by Patty Jansen, $1.99
Creating an ebook by Paul Hurst, free

Ah-huh, Graham was not very good at keeping his resolution you think, but wait until you read my rationalisations.

I sent Dave Kitson an $8 donation when I finished reading Turing Evolved.

Patty Jansen’s ebook was a 33 page novella. I think $1.99 is a fair price for a novella.

I read Randy Ingermanson’s newsletter, sometimes hurriedly, and mistakenly thought Oxygen was a novella with some writing tips at its end.

Creating an ebook, by Paul Hurst is only a small non-fiction book.

And I was not going to quibble about three cents in the price of Marketing for Authors.

So I reckon I kept my new year’s resolution.

Australian Book Sales in 2011.

According to an article in the Age by Jason Steger, the number of books sold in Australia last year dropped by 7.1% to 60.4 million, with their value dropping 12.6% to $1.1 billion. Most of the drop in sales is put down to the collapse of Angus and Robertson and Borders. I wonder how much was spent at overseas online bookshops by Australians.

In the US sales dropped from 717 million to 651 million. In Britain the value of book sales dropped $150 million. 

The same article said Mathew Reilly’s Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves was the top selling Adult novel in Australia in 2011, selling 124,000 copies. It was the third bestselling book in Australia last year. Di Morrissey’s The Opal Desert was the eighth bestselling book, with 92,000 copies sold.

My Novel Writing.

I finished chapter thirty-three on Tuesday and then got bogged down in chapter thirty-four. That chapter is told from the point of view of the XO of the starship as he organises its evacuation. I kept on changing the chapter as I thought about how he would manage the evacuation and what supplies he would take when there was virtually no chance of rescue and only eight tonnes capacity available. So a lot of words were deleted and I did not get to my 1000 words on any day. I ended the week with 69,000 words of the novel written.  

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