NaNoWriMo Interlude – Publishing Challenge! (Gallery)

I interrupt my NaNoWriMo updates to bring you the post I’ve been promising for weeks. But first…

Publication Day!
It’s Publication Day today for Poppy Day, a VERY SHORT flash fiction short story. This is one of my own personal favourites, and I particularly like the cover. Then again, I love poppies, so that probably has a lot to do with it.

I wrote Poppy Day when I realised that at every Remembrance Day Parade, songs from the two world wars are usually rolled out. And I wondered how those affected by many more recent conflicts might feel about that.

The poet helped with this one, coming up as well with the name at the end. He’s such an old romantic. ❤️

The story sold to My Weekly, with the fiction editor saying, ‘It brought a tear to my eye.’ Since then, it’s also been published in Twee Tales Twee, Twee Tales More, Flash Fiction 2, and Five Short Stories for Autumn.

You can find all of my books on the BUY MY BOOKS tab on the blog, or you can go to www.books2read.com/DianeWordsworth. You can also find this one here.

Publishing challenge
Poppy Day isn’t part of the publishing challenge, but it is Book 55 on the bounce.

I started this challenge back in October 2021, with a view to publishing a book a week for a year, regardless of whether that book was a short story, a novella, a novel, a writers’ guide, an anthology, or whatever. I wasn’t sure I’d do it, but I wanted to stock my ‘magic bakery’, i.e. before I started to write and self-publish a load of new material, I at least wanted an inventory of books so that readers had something to go to next. So I took a year out to do that.

Since then, I’ve sold more books than I ever sold in the previous 11 years, and that includes 3 traditionally published books. And they’re still selling, with most of my sales coming from OverDrive, which is a lending facility that I think users subscribe to.

I had a few spats along the way, mostly with Amazon throwing some of my books back for various reasons. But in the end, they published them all.

It’s been a long journey, during which time we moved house, had one holiday, and both of us had a stay in hospital, my own of which was as an emergency admission.

Fourteen of these books are brand new (including the novella and the writers’ guide). And I also ghost-wrote 5 Regency romances in that time, each one running to around the 83,000-word mark.

I’m really proud of this accomplishment, but now the writing starts again.

Gallery
Here they all are, then, in all of their chronological glory. You can find them all by following this link.

What do you think?

Here endeth today’s special bulletin.