Last year, around this time, I produced a blog post on my writing
activity during 2012. Because I find it useful to detail my activities, and it
may interest those who follow the blog, I’m repeating that exercise today for
2013.
It’s been a peculiar year in many ways. Socially and professionally
there have been many events and changes. I retired from employment in April and
celebrated my 65th birthday in May. In September, my wife and I
celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary and, in the same month, our
daughter reached the milestone age of 21. In December, my aunt reached the
great age of 100. So many reasons to celebrate, and the freedom to do so in
terms of travel and time.
I changed from PC to desktop iMac, an investment I’ve really appreciated
in spite of a few disappointments (Apple’s definition of ‘intuitive’ is clearly
not the same as mine!). But, in many ways this has been a positive change. I’m
still learning, though. And, possibly the single most irritating aspect is the
lack of a # on the keyboard, an exclusion that makes hash-tagging Twitter and
Facebook posts far less simple than it otherwise would be: Apple take note!
I spent a good deal of
time editing the first 2 volumes of my fantasy trilogy, since Fantastic BooksPublishing have accepted the work and will be publishing volume one, A Seared Sky – Joinings, soon. I also
spent a lot of hours writing book 3 of the series. This year will see the
editing of that volume, of course.
I wrote a few short
stories and entered a couple of contests, though fewer than I intended. I made
a start at writing poetry, and this is an activity I intend to increase over
the coming years: it’s a different skill from prose writing and has a
beneficial effect on that, developing the understanding of metaphor and simile
as well as encouraging brevity.
On the admin side, I’ve
continued with research and compilation of details of writing contests and you
can find this regularly up-dated information under the Writing Contests tab
above. Hope it’s useful.
Much of December I spent
in experimentation on social networking. (The chart illustrates the portion of
time spent on this) Really, I did this to confirm suspicions I acquired last
year about the effectiveness of such activity for an author. It seemed to me that
the apparently ubiquitous ‘author platform’ may be less than effective in
actually garnering readers and selling books. This year’s activity has
confirmed those suspicions and I shall be curbing my social networking activity
this year to concentrate on writing, submitting and publishing stories, since
it’s apparent that those writers who achieve wide readerships are the ones who
publish more work. As I enjoy the actual writing more than any other of the
activities that surround authorship, it will be a pleasure for me to take this
turn.
I’m also intending to read
more. I read 53 books in 2013 (most of them I reviewed as well) and I’ve set
myself a target of 52 books over the year, using the Goodreads Reading
Challenge as incentive for this.
The chart at the top of
this post shows the proportion of time I’ve spent on the various activities
during the year. It’s noticeable that the activity on which I’ve spent most time
is networking. Whilst there’s some satisfaction and much pleasure to be gained
from interacting (not to mention the way it can help others), I have my doubts
about its real value in relation to the activities of an author. The coming
year will see a great deal more actual writing, editing, submission and
publishing. I’m a writer, and writers write, after all.
So, to the comparison
figures, where I list ‘achievements’ for the year. I gave a list for 2012,
which I’ve repeated here, so we can see the comparison with 2013. Please note,
it’s the left hand column that shows this year’s activities.
2013 2012
Published work:
None! Sensuous
Touches, an erotic anthology.
Heir to Death’s Folly, a gothic horror short story.
Rebirth, my contribution to the sci-fi anthology, Fusion, published by Fantastic Books Publishing.
Writing Contests:
2 entered. No success 4
entered, 1 short-listed.
Social Networking as at
the end of each year:
2013 2012
Blog:
1181 posts 1062
posts
491 followers 447
followers
181,769 page views 85,511
page views
29,250 visitors
identifying location 18,882
visitors identifying location
Facebook:
1,001 books listed as
‘Read’ 882
books listed as ‘Read’
177 Reviews written 130
Reviews written
125 titles in ‘to read’
list 136
titles in ‘to read’ list
3,231 Friends 2,118
Friends
2,958 Contacts 2,274
Contacts
1,123 Followers 662
Followers
7,305 Pins on 33 boards 4,774
on 32 boards
559 in my circles 336
in my circles
413 circles including me 183
circles including me
8,759 Following me 5,110
Following me
8,758 I Follow 5,012
I Follow
22,033 Tweets 11,823
Tweets
As you can see, my social
networks have all expanded quite significantly. However, this increase has had
little impact on the number of books I’ve sold, which is you can expect less
social activity this year and more in the way of writing. I’ll continue to
record that here on the blog.
By all means add me on
your social networks: I’m cutting down on the activity, not stopping it
completely! Let’s see what 2014 has to offer, shall we?
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