Halfway

Book #3 of the Inheritance of Magic series has reached its halfway mark.  Judging whether a book’s half done always involves a bit of guesswork since I’m never quite sure how long it’s going to be or how much time it’ll take to do the chapters that are left, but these days I tend to set 90,000 words as a target length.  My books usually come in at a little longer than this, but not too much longer, so once a book’s passed the 45,000 word mark, I feel like I can call it halfway done.

The downside of this is that there’s really no chance I’m going to hit my June deadline.  This isn’t really too much of a surprise, since I knew from the start that it was unrealistic.  Back when I was writing the early Alex Verus books, my target was to average 9 months for each book – 3 months planning and editing, 6 months writing.  But even back then I had trouble hitting that, and nowadays I’m not even close – my actual writing speed these days averages to about 12 months per book.  I’d prefer it to be faster, but doing so means rushing and skipping over a lot of planning and editorial work that makes a big difference to the overall result.  Given the choice between spending an extra few months and putting out a book I’m not happy with, I’d rather spend the extra months.  I’m still a relatively new-ish author, and I’m planning to keep writing for decades more, which means that these books are going to be a part of my author history for a long, long time.  I want them to be good enough that I don’t feel embarrassed to point people at them.

In other news, my US & Canada sales numbers for An Inheritance of Magic have finally come in, and they’re pretty good!  Royalties for the first 3 months come to around 75% of the book’s advance.  This doesn’t mean that I’ll get to 150% in 6 months (book sales are heavily frontloaded) but it does means that I can safely predict that the book’s going to earn out its advance.  So based on sales numbers alone, I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble selling future books in the series to my US publisher.  Which means you guys in the USA can expect my books to keep coming out where you can buy them for the next few years!