Progress report #2

Unstable Orbits

Kindle Unlimited

A great/awful feature of Kindle Unlimited is a count on the author dashboard showing the current number of pages read. On social media I regularly see authors proudly posting their latest milestones: seven figures total, or six figures read this year, etc.

For those of us at the other end of the axis, it’s more depressing. Unstable Orbits counts as 485 pages long for Kindle Unlimited purposes, even though the book has 370 pages on Kindle (KU has a “normalised page count” algorithm it applies to all books). Divide the reported total pages read by 485, and I’ll get a rough number of full reads. It’s inaccurate, because not everybody finishes a book, and people might still be reading it when you do your maths.

I’ve promoted the KU release on a couple of relevant Facebook groups in the last few weeks. Total page reads for October 2025: 226. I suspect one or more people started reading, but have either paused or declared DNF (did not finish, in author jargon).

I enrolled the first two of my books in KU late last year, I think, and the rest followed this year. My total page reads for 2025 so far across six books: 967. Not many. Maybe soon I can post about reaching the milestone of four figures total. That’s some progress, at least.

But it’s very slow progress:

Audiobook

I’m now recording scenes from part 2 of Unstable Orbits.

In part 1, I recorded scenes in order. Any other order would of course be madness.

Well. Yes. But.

As the finish line approaches I’ll probably start to rush, resulting in a drop in quality. The final scene needs to have as much energy as the first: how best to achieve that?

Reversing the scenes? But then part 2 would start low-energy.

I could randomise the order, but where’s the fun in that?

My carefully selected algorithm is: record the longest scene not yet recorded. Longest scene first, then the next longest, and so on, each scene progressively shorter and shorter. The final scene I record will be the shortest of all.

I’ll accelerate towards the final recorded scene. The final in-order scene will be somewhere in the mix; I haven’t figured out where yet. Part of the fun of each recording session is learning which scene I’ll be recording.

Codename AXIS

If you missed the recent blog post, “the new book”, which I’ve given the codename AXIS, is now two books: AXIS 1 and AXIS 2.

Chapters 6–10 of AXIS 1 are done — significantly revised from the first draft. That completes revision 2 of the first half of the book (there’ll be several more). I’ve roughed out the changes for the second half of the book, and I’m now working on chapter 11.

I’m expecting 20 chapters in total, and 80–90k words.

Progress report #3 ->