Progress report #8

Haven’t done one of these posts in a while!

Between Two Worlds

This is the book formerly known as “AXIS book 1”. It’ll be published on September 1, 2026, for Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback. I haven’t yet decided whether to record an audiobook.

The manuscript has had many full revision passes since the last progress report. These include dictionary-based passes to check for dialect and language consistency, to vanquish crutch words I know I overuse, and so on.

As far as I’m concerned, the content is now frozen — apart from small tweaks I might want to make before release.

The ebook and paperback formats are both ready to upload to Amazon, assuming no more changes. I do have an idea for the paperback that I want to try out but it won’t disrupt the layout and won’t delay the paperback release.

I’ve created several graphics to include in the book. There are diagrams of Capricorn to help readers understand the major features, and a map of the sector in which the protagonist, Pod, lives. These graphics will appear on the Between Two Worlds book page on publication. Expect to see them in blog posts soon too.

The book’s now with my ARC readers. ARC applications were open for a couple of months but sadly I failed to entice many people – fewer than for Unstable Orbits. Perhaps for the next book I’ll take a different approach.

Pod of Capricorn, book 2

This is the book formerly known as “AXIS book 2”. It’ll have a proper title later, but for now I’ll refer to it using the series title, abbreviating to POC2.

I’ll get back to the next draft of POC2 once Between Two Worlds is released. I’m not expecting plot changes, but it’ll certainly need a few full passes – notably for dialect consistency.

POC2 will be released in 2027.

Unstable Orbits

To mark the first anniversary of the release of Unstable Orbits in June, I reduced the price to 99p/99c for a week and ran an ad campaign for the book on Meta in the UK.

It was a week of two halves. The first day or two went well, and Unstable Orbits reached #2 in the Amazon UK best seller list for Teen & Young Adult LGBTQ+ Literature. It reached as high as #4 in Fiction About LGBTQ+ Issues for Young Adults and also #4 in LGBTQ+ Fiction for Young Adults. The overall rank of the Kindle book peaked at 10,312. I don’t think I’ve seen better figures for any of my books.

Sadly, in the second half of the week everything dropped off a cliff. Meta still showed ads (I saw one myself, on Threads), and seemingly people kept clicking them, but they didn’t translate to sales. I have no idea why not. Did Meta shift the ads to a different audience?

I also have no idea why Meta didn’t use all the text variations I provided for the ad copy, and instead reused text from the previous ad campaign nearly a year ago. That was disappointing.

Overall, I made a loss — for a 99p sale the royalties are pretty meagre, and the cost of advertising greatly outweighed the revenue from sales after the first couple of days. But I hope the people who bought the book enjoy it, and leave a rating/review.

During the week I also sold a couple of audiobook copies of Unstable Orbits, and saw some page reads for A Room Full of Elephants.

Miscellaneous

Since the last progress report I went with a friend to Wimbledon, spending a breezy night in a tent to secure astonishingly good tickets for a blisteringly warm Centre Court. (The Wimbledon Queue is an institution and an experience, and thousands queue each day for tickets to the grounds or for one of the show courts – Centre Court, Court One, or Court Two. To guarantee a good ticket – like five rows back from the court – you need to camp out overnight and most of the day before. And no, you can’t just pitch a tent in the queue and leave for the night: your tent will be removed and you’ll lose your queue position. The queue is organised and monitored by the AELTC, which runs the championships.)

I also marched at Pride in London with the Families Together London group, as I try to do every year. It’s genuinely one of the highlights of my year.

Here are a few photos: