Over the holidays I managed to add a chapter and a half to The Lord of the Elements (the prequel to The Last Observer). To be honest, I am still trying to plan the story a bit….. I mean, I know what the plot is but it needs a few twists, turns and subplots and I am still ironing it all out so progress is slow. Meanwhile, I am starting a new business book with my colleague Patrick Reames that we hope will be out later this year. I am also preparing a new version of Poems for the Little Room that will be better suited for Amazon and Kindle…..
Of course, books need to find a market too. It would be great if my books occupied a particular niche but they don’t. I have books on hedge funds, commodity trading software, fantasy novels, poetry, esoteric philosophy, magic and so on…. That means that each book more or less has to be independently marketed. So I do apologize if you are sick of reading about my damn books…. but give me a break and a bit of leeway, I obviously want to sell them after writing them… At least, that’s the general idea I believe.
If writing and promoting wasn’t enough when you do sell a few books it seems that you have to chase the damn royalties. I realized today that I have never received a dime from Kindle so I wrote a couple of ‘where is my money’ letters to Amazon this evening. I have a publisher who is slow to report and I need to send him an email reminding him to let me know where we stand. Meanwhile, the two books on software that sell quite well, well, Amazon pays royalties every month – just not to me! (to my former employer!). Oh well. Shouldn’t moan especially so early in the new year.
The Last Observer continues to sell but more slowly than I really hoped. I keep imagining that it might take off a bit and suddenly accelerate in sales.
I read a story today on the Internet. I would link to it but I don’t think I could find it again. It was about Sting earning 2,000GBP per day in royalties! Apparently, a good proportion of this is for one song and apparently, he actually wrote it with the rest of the band but they didn’t insist on putting their names to it while he did so it is credited simply to Sting……… now, those are the kind of royalties you can only dream about (or imagine).