It was also productive in the books I was able to put up on Amazon. Many people can get 1 to 2 titles out a year, but I managed 3 in one month. That brings my total number of books on Amazon and Smashwords up to 9, and there’ll be another one here when I get word from Google on whether I can use their logo on my cover or not. Let’s break those main points down and take a look at each in turn.
Content Writing
I pretty much just chugged along on Australia this past month. We finished a huge article/blog post on Book Today, and it should be going up shortly. The poor guys I submitted it to have to go and round up hundreds of pictures on the places I talked about.
Besides that monster, which I’ll talk about in detail when it’s published, there were a few other content jobs. I had an interesting day early in the month writing 50 bicycle product descriptions, and I also did some herbal tea blog posts for someone one morning. Another job that I didn’t know much about until I started researching it was cloud content. I had a guy in Europe hire me to fix up his different content pages, which is still a work in progress.
Their Books
I had a few different eBooks this month to work on and play around with. The first was a diet plan book that was a pretty quick job. The guy had a lot of chapters written, and they just needed to be added to and reworked a bit. We got up to about 40 pages on that one with pictures.
Another project I worked on was an editing job for a fantasy eBook. It was Arthurian fantasy, and the book was pretty good. I’ll write a review for it when it’s put up on Amazon. The final project was a book on Tarot cards which I enjoyed working on. It was fun to learn about the different meanings of the cards, although issues with payment arose that are still being worked out.
My Books
And then of course there’s my books, the 3 I put out there this month. Tribes and Trappers was the first, and it’s had a few sales. I was really happy with how it turned out, and especially the cover. I wrote the whole thing in about a month and put up one chapter each day on the site.
I followed the same strategy with Write Now! and the two books were written at the same time. I think they’re both great, and I expect to see them do quite well in future sales. The last was English Rocks! which was a real labor. I loved writing it because I knew it would help teachers out. It was quite an undertaking though, coming in at about 170 pages, with more pictures than lessons. I was quite happy when I finished it, and when I got my first sales on Amazon and Smashwords.
I hope that May can be just as productive as April was, and I actually expect it to be more so. I’ve got a lot more time to write now that I’m ready to leave China. My job teaching will end soon and I’ll be floating by on a tourist visa. My wife and son will also head to Russia for a month, so I’ll have no job and the place to myself. There’s a strong possibility that I’ll get two of my own books out this month, especially since the Google book is now finished and just waiting to go. I could pump out a short novel if I really wanted to, and that’s the direction I’m heading in. Time to take a break from non-fiction for a bit.