Progress Report, January 2022

Hunter's Redoubt: 117k words.

It occurs to me that I didn't actually make a progress post for December at the start of January. I did talk about the state of Michelle, but that's not quite the same thing.

The last half of January was almost normal in terms of writing; the first half was the slow crawl back to the right frame of mind, the mental readjustment to Omicron, etc. I consider myself lucky: no one in my immediate circle has caught Covid. There's a sense that it's inevitable at this point, but... my parents, my long-suffering spouse's parents, and our families, have been covid-free, as have my immediate friends.

In the what can I do about it category, the answer is: write. I know that there are readers who find respite in my books and in my words, even when they make me pull all my hair out while writing them. No writer can see their work as a reader does, after all. (I have a bit more to say about the ways in which writer-brain is a distinct negative when it comes to getting things done.)

***

I am continuing to pursue audiobooks for the remainder of the Sun Sword books, thanks to Patreon; my plan at the moment is: audiobooks of the new novels, ebooks of the new novels, and in the worst case scenario, Print On Demand versions.

I know there are a lot of authors who feel publishers are not a value-added proposition - but the cost of print from the perspective of one midlist author is: print is financially ruinous if done as publishers do it. A publisher might give me a small advance, but they're sinking a lot of money into physical print runs and distribution--and that amount is more than the Patreon in total. If my books were short books, that might not be the case, but if they were shorter, many things might be different.

So: text design, typesetting, editing, copy-editing, proof-reading, cover design, cover art/artist - all of those things are paid for, in the traditional model, by the publisher--but the high cost is the actual print run, warehousing, distribution, fulfillment. The first list of things was what I hoped this Patreon would allow me to accomplish; I wasn't thinking of audiobook costs at all at the time, but because of the generosity of my readers, I've added audio going forward.

And I can do all of that.

But: print run, warehousing, distribution/fulfillment remains elusive. So print might be Print on Demand (I don't know how many of you have seen Memory of Stone in print, but that's Print on Demand, which gets around the cost of the off-set run, the distribution, the warehousing and the fulfillment. It's expensive per-unit, but it allows a print version to exist.)

***

This post is mirrored from https://michellewest.ca/

I find it hard to have a conversation on Patreon, and have created a WordPress Patreon only blog to make it easier for me to find new comments and respond to them, sometimes at length.

This post is https://michellewest.ca/2022/02/01/progress-report-january-2022/; you should be able to hit Login with Patreon, and should be able to read posts there at the same levels you can read them here.

I'll answer comments here as well if this is your preferred format, but probably not as expansively (which might be a good thing!).