This morning, I received an email beginning:
Well, it’s 2.00 in the morning and I’ve just finished your book.
The email made me laugh out loud, and I reflected that it’s considerably easier to write these days in the knowledge that people might want to read the final product.
This correspondent raised an issue. Am I still retired from writing? I thought I’d update this blog with the answer. As usual, I’ll try to avoid obfuscation.
I worked with my agent on an updated version of Déjà Vu over the summer. (With her permission, I used this text to revise to the ebook, so it’s effectively a new edition.) She then sent the book to various publishers. As is now becoming typical, I had positive comments from all of them, but no bites. There’s a small chance that one might come back to us at this point, but I’m not holding my breath.
Tracking my sales is becoming difficult because some income is through Amazon’s lending programme (US-only). As a rough guide, I’ve sold about 16,000 books through the Kindle, and about the same number again (I think) has gone in free promotions.
I’m still writing. My goal is to finish a final draft of The Amber Rooms but the end of October and pass this to my agent. She’s promised to edit it throughout November (though I’ve just realised that I haven’t mentioned the length of the length, which is about double Déjà Vu), and I’d like to release it for Xmas. The picture at the head of this post is the latest version. What do you think?
I heard a statistic a couple of years back that academics top the UK chart for unpaid overtime. Whether or not that’s still true, my writing is very squeezed at the moment. It’s getting harder to sit down at a computer after a day’s work. I’m pretty confident I can finish off The Amber Rooms by then, but there’s a chance it might finish me first.
Under the auspice of Thirst eDitions, a writerly conglomeration and child of Matt F Curran’s brain, I’ve just published a short book that examines some of the philosophical issues that artificial intelligence researchers need to address. It’s written for undergraduate psychologists but the lay reader should enjoy it. If you’re intrigued about the extent to which Saskia Brandt is human, knock yourself out with Down to the Wire: A Short Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.
Finally, I’ve made Déjà Vu, Flashback, and Proper Job free for the next five days. There’s no scheme behind this decision other than the natural cycle of the Kindle promotions mechanism for self-published authors; essentially, you have five days of free offer for every ninety, and I’m still in the business of getting my books read. I’m planning to make them free again at Christmas, partly to coincide with the launch of the Amber Rooms, and partly because it’s Christmas and I want to bring down everyone’s mood with tales of my heroine trapped in time.