Hive First Draft Nearly Finished

The rough draft is almost done! It’s three chapters to go, followed by an epilogue for Hive (so think of it as four more chapters if you want). Then my rough draft will be complete.

Today I spent a bulk of the day working on it. I managed to write a full chapter and a bit of another. I got a lot of words in today. And speaking of words, here’s a fun fact:

The unfinished draft of Hive is already longer than the complete book of Veznek. The book is currently on track to be longer than Kholvaria, but likely shorter than Iris. That would make Hive [predictively] the 2nd longest book in the series once it’s finished, which seems pretty likely to be the case.

Despite the length of the book, the per-chapter page count is actually lower than the other books. In this case, the fact that there are more chapters make up for the fact that the chapters are shorter on average. Much like Cassidy, the story moves pretty quickly and visits a huge variety of different locations. Hence the need for shorter chapters and more of them.

I am pretty excited that the book is starting to come together. Now that an end is close to sight, I am starting to think that a December release date could be possible. I’d LOVE to get it released around that time, ideally before Christmas. With people getting Kindle readers as gifts, December 25th is often a big day for book downloads. I also know that the sooner I get books released, the sooner I see a hike in sales across all books, not just whatever is new.

In general, sales have slowed a LOT lately. This is the slowest month of sales I can remember in a long time. But I’m not surprised. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new release and now that the two short story collections are no longer on the market, I’ve definitely seen a drop in customer traffic. I guess I didn’t realize how many of my sales were driven from the Pew! Pew! collections, but it does make sense.

But again, it’s all the more reason to get Hive out as soon as possible. When that book comes out, I know I’ll see an uptick. December is the goal right now and I’m sticking to it.

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