My first book finally earns out!

Friends, raise a glass with me – after 6 years, my first traditionally published book has finally earned back its advance and started making real money!

Today, I received in the post my twice yearly Royalty Statement, to find that my equestrian title THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF TRAINING has moved into the black – by all of £5.47

Sadly no cheque – I did investigate the envelope very carefully, but I had a sneaky suspicion and read the small print on the bottom of the statement – ‘amounts due less than £10 will be carried forward’.

Yup, I seemed to remember that from long, long ago, back when I believed I’d be earning money from my publisher far sooner, and far in excess of that type of figure.

Silly me.

It’s only taken 6 years…

But hey, my book has earned out, and that’s far more than the majority of books do 🙂

My second, which was published 2 years later, still has just over £400 to go to earn out, but it looks like it probably will get there eventually too – real author success!

(Psst – the fact that my indie published books have already earned more than one of my advances in less than a year might have something to do with my decision to self-publish – but let’s not tell my publisher that, shall we?)

And in other news…

Promo

The messed up promo I reported on earlier this week, here, was still quite a success in the end. Even going it alone (with a little help from a few of my friends who were able to participate in the promo, ‘cos they live in the US), I put in a fair amount of effort and it paid off, with DESPRITE MEASURES selling more in one week than it has in the past 3 months, and reaching peak rankings of 17,122 overall paid books on Amazon UK, and 33,203 on Amazon US. With over 4 million books on offer, I’m pretty chuffed with those figures.

Anthologies

I have short stories due out in 2 forthcoming anthologies – yay! One is a return to my roots – a science fiction piece in a collection called ‘THE WORLD AND THE STARS’ – more on that later – and a short sprite story for one entitled, ‘ALTERED PERCEPTIONS’.

Once the anthologies are out, I plan on offering one of these stories as a freebie to all followers of this site as a thank you gift.

Commission

On the technical side, I’ve just written a commissioned piece for a UK dressage site, entitled ‘7 Simple Steps to Improving Your Dressage Scores’

which can be downloaded as a very attractively presented freebie from here.

Prince’s Son Update

And to round this off, a quickie update on progress of The Prince’s Son, sequel to The Prince’s Man. I estimate it to be around two thirds done, although the way my characters love to enlarge the story, my accuracy may be questionable!

It has already split into a novel (TPS) and a novella (The Prince’s Nephew) as it was threatening to rival a G.R.R. Martin length tome, and I don’t want to keep my readers waiting that long.

So cheers, folks, and please have that drink with me…