NaNoWriMo: remembering the first time!

Do you NaNo? I haven’t this year, but I can still remember the first time. That makes it sound as if it was decades ago. It was actually in 2015 – but that seems like a VERY long time ago now! I’ve written so much since then… If you’re reading this and saying ‘Hang on,

The parting of the ways

That title is much more dramatic than this post will be :-)! However, I decided this was something worth writing a little blog about, so here goes. Most of my books – by quite a long way – are books for adults. However, just before the pandemic, I published a picture book for children –

10 thoughts on being an independent author

As it’s Indie Author Week this week, and I’ve now been self-publishing for just over 6 years, here are some thoughts on what it’s like to be an independent author. Before I start, two things: What follows is drawn from my own experience – I’m not saying it will be the same for everyone who

It’s my publiversary! 10 thoughts on 5 years of self-publishing

Time flies when you’re having fun! I only realised this morning that today is the fifth anniversary of the date I published my first book, The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve done publiversary posts before, which you can find by searching for ‘publiversary’, but I felt that I probably ought to mark a half-decade

One year old: happy birthday, Caster and Fleet!

I can’t believe it, but it’s true. I had a sort-of-feeling, and when I checked on Amazon I was right. The Case of the Black Tulips, the first book in the Caster & Fleet series, will be one year old on 19 June. I told my husband and he said ‘Is that all?’ And I

It’s my 3-year self-publiversary today! 12 reflections…

I noticed about halfway through this morning, in the midst of running errands and nothing much to do with writing, that today is my 3-year self-publiversary. My first self-pubbed book launched on 1 April 2016 (I picked that date for a reason, honest!), and hey, here I still am. I published a post for my

How do I measure success as a writer?

This is something which has been on my mind lately, probably as a sort of hangover from all those goal-setting New Year posts. What’s the best way to measure success as a writer? Or do I mean as a publisher? Ooh, now that’s a different question entirely. There are so many things you could focus

Why I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year

It feels weird to say out loud that I’m not going to be taking part in NaNoWriMo this time around. Admittedly I haven’t been writing long, in the grand scheme of things, but NaNo in November, and Camp NaNo in April and July, formed part of my goals and targets and gave a bit of

Happy self-publiversary to me!

I only noticed this about half an hour ago (it’s latish afternoon here in the UK), but today is my 30-month or 2.5-year self-publiversary! Yes, two and a half years ago I unleashed The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes on an unsuspecting world, and then, well, I just kept going. 30 months feels like a long time

Crunching the numbers: Book Report

WARNING: If you don’t like numbers or graphs you might want to look away now…or skip this post altogether! I’m probably a gazillion steps behind the rest of the author community, but I just signed up for Book Report. If you haven’t seen it, Book Report makes an easy-read dashboard out of your Amazon KDP