My writing week 4 (17)

Hi all,

After weeks of doing little writing, except Divine magazine articles, I actually did some editing of my novella last week. Yaaa me. And things are looking good for this week as I have caught up with other activities like gardening and newspaper reading. I still need to strip the rest of the paint off a picket fence and paint it, followed by painting new guttering.

Novella

It is amazing how the plot needed to change in my novella after I substituted an ipad for a newspaper. My main character had been reading a newspaper, but as the story is set about a decade into the future, I decided to give him something more advanced, an ipad. He then needed something to carry it in, so I gave him a backpack.

In the novella he has to make a hasty exit. He had previously just dropped the newspaper and ran, but now he had to try and bundle his ipad into his backpack while lurching for the exit. Those in pursuit catch up with him. Previously they grabbed at his clothing, now they had a backpack to latch on to. The backpack is lost, but when found it provides evidence to back up his alibi. The police had been a lot less believing when he just lost a newspaper.

The novella is now 24,000 words.

Ebooks Seem to be Getting Cheaper

I just checked Amazon Kindle’s top 100 bestseller list for the first time in a couple of months. Fifty-two of the ebooks were $2.99 or less, with 28 at 99c and 12 at $2.99. Twelve were $9.99. There were none priced at $12.99. Last time I checked, twenty were $12.99, six were $7.99, nine were $2.99 and twenty were 99c. No other prices had significant numbers.

Ebooks Most Popular Book Format in US

I have read reports from Amazon that they sell 115 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks, but that was just Amazon. Now, according to Jason Steger’s Bookmarks column in last Saturday’s Age, the Association of American Publishers is reporting that the ebook is the most popular format out of adult hardbacks, paperbacks, mass-market, children and young adult hardbacks and paperbacks.

They AAP says print sales fell 25 per cent in the first two months of this year, while ebook sales jumped 169 per cent. And the full impact of the collapse of Borders in the US is still yet to be felt according to Publisher’s Weekly.

The data continues to suggest that print books will be much rarer in the future, replaced by dirt cheap and free ebooks.

Graham Clements.