Amanda Fleet's Blog

Title and cover reveal!

Ta da!!!

Oh, I have been back and forth with the cover designers with this one, but I'm really happy with this final version!

Pre-orders should be finalised today, too, so watch this space for the links.

It's nearly there!

I've gained an initial!

I don't have a middle name. My parents said they had enough difficulty choosing one name for me. Which has been fine, up until now. I am "no middle name". Like Reacher.

Except, when I publish the next book, I need to have a slightly different name, because it's in (yet) another genre. I didn't realise it, earlier in my career, but things like the Amazon algorithm get terribly confused when you publish in different genres but all under the same name.

Oops.

Consequently, the new book will be published under Amanda M Fleet.

Why not "Mandy Fleet"? Or "Manda Fleet"?

Because I don't like either of those names. I have never been called Mandy (and have no desire to ever be called that), and although loads of my family seem incapable of putting the first A in my name, I'm no fan of Manda, either. (If I'm being 100% honest, I don't especially like the name Amanda much)

Why M? No particular reason. I was going to go for J, but after doing a Google search found there was an Amanda Jayne Fleet, and I didn't want to muddy the waters. Searching for Amanda M Fleet mostly brought up things relating to me. More importantly, there weren't any Amanda M Fleets on Amazon, so I wouldn't be treading on any toes, or competing with anyone.

I had wondered about going for an entirely different name altogether (something I did like!), but in the end I thought that might make the book not feel like mine in some way.

Keep your eyes peeled for title reveals and cover reveals!

"So, that's you almost finished with the book, then?"

The words of my running buddy, when I told him I'd finished the last edit.

Um, no...

Still to do (at that point) and in no particular order:

register the ISBNdraw up a cover briefsend the cover brief to cover designersort out keywords for the metadatasort out the blurb for the back of the paperback and the sales pagesend book to beta readersincorporate any feedback from beta readersrun the book through ProWritingAid (again)proofreadfinalise the paperback interiorfinalise the Kindle versionwrite a short-story to give away to people joining my mailing listsign off on the coverset up the sales pageupdate the back matter of all my other books to include new oneset up an auto ad on Amazonset up category ads on Amazonsort out keywords for KW ads on Amazonupdate social media accounts with new coverupdate websitecreate promo imagessign up on book promotion sitesremind my ARC readers to post a review once the book is liveclaim the book on Goodreads, BookBub, Amazon etc., once it's live

and I'm sure I've missed plenty off that list!

But yeah... I've "almost finished with the book"

Updates...

I know... I've been completely missing in action for months! I've been writing. Well, re-writing. You remember several years ago I did NaNoWriMo? I completed the 50K in November 2020 (see my posts about that here and here) but then everything got shelved. I published "Invasion", then wrote and published "Chaos". In between publishing those last two parts of the Guardians of The Realm series, my beloved father passed away, and my writing mojo vanished. I concentrated on getting the audiobooks finished (which took a lot longer than I'd anticipated), then finally turned my attention back to the book I'd started in NaNoWriMo 2020.

Well. That was an interesting experience.

When I started going through it in March of this year, I couldn't make head nor tail of my notes! The book stood at 65.4K words, but it was spaghetti.

I re-plotted it out, scene by scene. The basic structure was okay, but I could not get the central plot theme to work where the book was set. It either had to change location, or change time-period (or both).

By 30th May, the main comment in my notebook was AAAAGGHHH!

The book had been set in Ardersier, and there had been a major plot point based around Fort George and the Jacobites. If the book moved either location or time-period, that whole plot-line had to go.

My notes on 30th May said:

I need to think about all of this. A big chunk of me is ready to abandon the whole thing... so much of me is thinking "why bother?" not helped by finding out today that all of my books have been pirated and are available for free on a website.

Thankfully, I'd been able to get back into running, because I needed a lot of plot-runs while I figured out what on earth I was doing with it.

Over the next week, I sorted out a whole new plot! The book moved from Ardersier to Masham (Yorkshire), and various characters changed names and occupations. I finished the "first draft" of the new version of the book at the end of September, and started on editing. By the start of November, I had a book I was happy with!

It's been out to my amazing beta readers, and they all love it (hooray!), so now I'm on the eleventy-sqillion things I need to do before it gets published. The goal is that it will be published at the end of this year.

And then...? Well, then the Shiny New Thing that's now been brewing for a few years might finally get its turn.

The recording tent is DOWN!

 Which can only mean...

I have finished the audiobooks!

"Chaos" was uploaded last week and should be available now in some places, and everywhere soon. I've been chasing up why "War" still doesn't have Whispersync. It should have been there within 30 working days after it was live and it's now ~60 working days, but Audible/Amazon rarely actually have people dealing with things, as far as I can tell, just bots.

I now have acres of space in the room where the recording tent was. It was up for over a year, so it's taking a bit of time to get used to how the room looks now. The cat wasn't happy. He used to like hiding in the tent.

Anyway, that's now all of the books in The Guardians of The Realm series done and I can get back to writing.

I just need to figure out what I'm writing now.

Last big push!

No, I'm not having a baby (though maybe that would have been easier!). The audiobook for "Invasion" is uploaded and awaiting approval!

I had been working on the files until ~ 4pm, then having the last part of the day to plan The Potential New Book (TPNB). When I was doing research for TPNB, that was fine. My brain is good at mechanical tasks in an afternoon. But, it's less good at the creative stuff, so once I'd finished doing the bits of research I wanted to do, when I got to 'playtime' I just stared at a blank page and came up with nothing.

Instead, I decided to push on with processing the audiobook files, with the result that yesterday, they were all uploaded to both ACX (Audible) and Findaway Voices (everyone else). It will take a few days for them to be available, and even longer for the Whispersynch to work ("War" still doesn't seem to have it enabled...), but I can at least cross them off my to-do list!

Since I had originally scheduled today and tomorrow (31st Jan and 1st Feb) for processing, ACX, and Findaway Voices stuff, they are now free! I could make a start on processing the files for "Chaos" but instead, I'm having a couple of solid days working on the plot outline for TPNB. The aim is then to process "Chaos" until mid-afternoon, then write at the end of the day. As I said, sometimes I'm not stunningly creative at the end of the day, but if I've already planned the scene(s) then writing them is usually okay. I'll try it for a couple of weeks. If I'm still staring at a blank page and not managing to write, I'll revert to cracking on with the processing and leaving myself another full day for planning. I'm still aiming to have a full plan and a few thousand words written by the time I've finished processing the audiobook files.

It does feel nice to have another one ticked off the list!

Ideas are stirring...

I've been doing pretty well at sticking to the plan of processing the audiobook files until about 4pm, then switching to thinking about The Potential New Book. I'm 3/4 through the processing of "Invasion" and am hoping to get it out either by the end of January or the start of February.

This stage of the processing is fairly dull - removing breath-sounds and mouth clicks from between words/sentences. It's slow-going, but important for the listening experience. No one want to hear me hauling air or making weird noises! But it's one of those activities that uses a bit of brain, but not so much that I'm not able to think about other stuff.

Consequently, while a fraction of my brain works on the audiofile processing, a chunk of my brain is thinking about The Potential New Book, and as well as giving over the end of the work-day to thinking about it, I'm also getting ideas throughout the day.

I always have a notebook or paper at my side, so I've been scribbling down things as they come to me over the day, then processing them more neatly into the New Notebook once I get to 'playtime'.

I'm not quite at that stage where the ideas are coming so thick and fast that I fear I won't be able to capture them all before they evaporate into the ether (thankfully!), but I can't tell you how much of a relief it is that the ideas are starting to flow!

Plottr

Plottr is a programme which is aimed at helping writers to plot their novels (though it could also be used to plan other things). I've never really used it before, but there was a Black Friday deal last year which gave a reduced fee for a year's subscription. It also had a reduced fee for a lifetime subscription but I wanted to try it out before shelling out lots of money, in case I didn't get on with it.

In the past, I've mostly used index cards for planning - either real or virtual. Real ones used to be laid out on my dining room table with key plot points on larger index cards and intervening scenes on smaller ones. I blogged about it here.

This slowly morphed to doing the same but with Scrivener's index cards/scene cards, although I struggled with the visual layout, preferring the long horizontal timeline I could get with my dining room table, rather than the tiling in Scrivener.

So why did I decide to dabble with Plottr?

Mostly it's the layout, though now I have it, I can see other advantages in it. In Plottr, the timeline/structure continues horizontally and you can have different strands across it. You could choose plots and sub-plots as the strands, or choose to follow different characters. Where they intersect are essentially scenes.

You could choose to create the structure from scratch (as I have in the mock-up above) but there are also a lot of templates that you can use. You can even combine templates and then edit them and save them as your own template, should you so wish. I've done that with the structure of "Book #12" (yes, yes... it will get a name eventually!).

As well as the ability to plot/structure the book, there are a lot of other features. Too many to cover in a blog post! I'm currently dabbling with the character notes and general notes features. You can also set up book series (though currently, you can't add an already existing book to an already existing series, you have to create the books within the series). Character, setting and general notes can be common to all the books in a series, or you can tag them just to individual books (handy for tagging those characters who die!).

No, this won't replace either my notebooks (where I do most of my planning) or Scrivener (where I actually write the thing). But, I can export the plan generated in Plottr to Scrivener (along with the notes made in Plottr), so my desire to have the whole plot laid out in one horizontal line is met. I've also really enjoyed playing with the templates on it. Not just the plot templates, but also the character templates. I haven't quite got my head around the tagging features, but no doubt that will come.

As for audiobook processing... I'm just over halfway through processing "Invasion" so actually, it's going pretty well. I'm still managing to process for the majority of the day, then play with Plottr and my notebooks at the end of the afternoon. I'm also hugely buoyed up by quite how many people have borrowed the audiobooks in Sweden, via Storytel!

I've started a new notebook...

Regular readers will know that this means that the Little People In My Head are finally talking loudly enough that I think there might be a new book brewing.

No promises. These are still early days.

It has also proved to be A Good Carrot.

I'm currently working my way through processing the audiofiles for "Invasion". It is really helping me keep my backside in the chair and my headphones on to know that if I clear the work, I get to play with the new book at the end of the day.

The (vague) aim is to spend time in January planning the book, then try to write for an hour at the end of each work day after I've finished processing the audiobooks. With any luck, by the time I have the audiobooks finished, I will also have a decent plan for the book and a few thousand words written.

I'm currently researching how to market the book and what 'the market' wants (to try to avoid doing what I did with The Guardians series, which was write a series that has proved really challenging to market!). It's been interesting to see what Publisher Rocket thinks the UK search terms are and what the US would use. What works well in the UK often does nothing in the US. Of course, that makes it slightly trickier ultimately, because the same set of keywords are used for all the marketplaces. I wish we could set different keywords for the different markets, but sadly we can't.

Here's hoping that putting the legwork in now with the market research will pay off in the end.

2023 at last

Is it just me, or did 2022 go on for far longer than a year??

It's that time of the year when I look back over the past year and look forward to the coming year.

2022

Releases: I finished the Guardians of The Realm series with the publication of the final book, "Chaos" - something that was personally very challenging, as one of the themes explored in the book linked all too closely with the loss of my father in late 2021.

Sales increased again last year (in general), though perhaps not as much as I might have hoped. Certainly not what I had aimed for. Still, an increase is an increase, right? The US is still a market I struggle in, but the UK, Canada and Australia have all been pretty reasonable.

I read 44 books over the year, including all of the Reacher books. I kind of got on a roll with them! I must confess to not enjoying the latest ones which are a joint venture between Lee Child and his brother Andrew Child. Both the characterisation and the plotting seem 'off'. I don't think I will read any more of the jointly written ones. I would happily re-read some of the earlier ones though (and I'm not one for re-reading books all that much).

My knitting has come on leaps and bounds and I've even been designing my own sweaters! I finally mastered knitting in two colours and holding a yarn in each hand. I still haven't mastered "The Norwegian purl". Considering that I only learned to knit 3 years ago, I'm pretty chuffed with my progress. You can see pictures of my sweaters on my Instagram page @amandafleet.

We had an influx of hedgehogs in the garden (though we can currently see no sign of them, not even in the hog-houses we made for them... I hope they return in Spring). Again, you can see pictures and videos of them on my Instagram page.

All of the audiobooks are now recorded, and the first three ("Aegyir Rises", "Aeron Returns" and "War") are available both on Audible and most other audiobook sites.

2023

I've still to finish processing the audiobook files for "Invasion" and "Chaos". I'm not going to put an estimated date for completion on it, because I totally suck at those and they get pushed back and pushed back! It can be mind-numbingly dull to do the "cut out all the breath sounds" processing so I never get as much done in a day as I hope I might. I'll aim for no more than "They'll be released in 2023".

I have my time-travel romance book to edit and I really am aiming to get that released this year. I wrote it so long ago!

After such a long time when the little people in my head have been silent, they've finally started talking to me again. If they would just get a little louder, there should be some writing going on this year. I wrote nothing new last year, and that felt very strange.

And of course, there will be more knitting, more learning of Gaelic, and holidays! We're already booked for two weeks away in Orkney, plus a visit to family, earlier in the year. If Orkney can't wake up the little people in my head, I don't know what will.

What has everyone else got planned for 2023?