Dids and Didn'ts

Now that we are well into the latter part of 2018 (seriously, where did it all go?!), it's time to take stock of all the things that have been accomplished, and those that are yet to see the finish line.

I DID get what I think is my final Kindle Worlds payment. I'm actually not sure it's the last payment because it's a strange amount per book, and the actual royalty statement is not available because KW royalty statements were always considered in beta and therefore rarely show up.

When these titles were still available on Amazon, I would earn paid a whopping $0.69 per ebook sold. If it was fully read during the very short time it was available as a Kindle Unlimited title, I would earn just over $1. This royalty payment? It was $0.49 for each of the three titles. Seems to me that this was what they were saying was going to be the final estimated KU pages read after the titles were no longer available. So they considered that the last person that purchased the KU titles and hadn't read them would only read half of all three of them. Okay. That's a weird way to read a series.

I DIDN'T complete my goal for Camp NaNoWriMo in July. No surprise there. I rarely do. However, I DID come out of July with 21 pages written, so it's still a win in--and for--my book.

I DIDN'T complete a reading challenge I gave myself last year. I was going to read the entire Baby-sitters Club series mostly just for kicks, but also for YA research. I had also planned to come full circle by writing an article or essay about the experience. Unfortunately, I've read only seven so far. It was a combination of not being able to justify the cost (totally tax deductible expense as research for a writer, I just didn't have the Amazon money on hand) and not being able to stay away from all of the places where I get free books. Those had to be top priority to continue getting free books, so those took up a lot of my reading/reviewing time.

I'm still going to finish the series, but I might only get around to reading a few books per year. I hope I can manage a little more this time around because I really would like to move on to Sweet Valley--if the publishers ever decide to include all the spinoffs on ebook. 

Now I just have to check my list and see what more I can get in the DID column by the end of August.

The Marathon Has Begun!

I mentioned a couple of months ago I was setting up a reading project for myself, but stayed vague on the details. So, what's the project? I've embarked on a reading marathon. I'm giving myself a year (hopefully that's enough time!) to read the entire Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M. Martin--plus Super Specials, Mysteries, and spinoffs. Thanks to a user on this BSC board for the complete list, I know that it is 367 books. But they are children's books, so maybe I have to invest an hour and a half to each, including note-taking time.

Why am I doing this? Honestly, I don't entirely know. There was a hankering to do it, so I decided now is the time. I know what it's not--it's not some desperate attempt to recapture my youth, because most of the time I spent reading these stories as a kid I finished each book wishing I was a character in it and totally jealous that I wasn't. Though I can see it being beneficial to me as a writer, because it's a deep study of a successful series that's stood the test of time. And I never got to read them all as a kid, so now I can fill in the gaps.

Originally, this marathon was supposed to be for Sweet Valley High and all of those spinoffs because I only read a few Sweet Valley University titles in middle school (and loved them, of course), but there were a few problems with a SVH marathon--the major problem being the spinoffs are not available for Kindle yet. And I'm a stickler about reading in chronological order, which means there are three or four spinoffs that take place before the original series. The additional problem with a SVH marathon is that there is no single list of every title available like the BSC has, and as far as I can tell while I'm putting one together myself, there has to be close to 600 books. I'm a good reader, but whoa... maybe that marathon needs a little more planning.

Along with this is all that regular, mundane adulting I have to do. Like finishing the third installment for my Kindle Worlds series. It's going slow, but it's going. I still hope to succeed with 10k words before the end of the month. I just need to give myself a little boost to get through that first draft.