75 Book Challenge Update…

Exactly Three Months To Go…

The challenge ends on my 76th birthday on November 10th.

In case you have missed what I am doing, I am attempting to publish 75 major books (novels, collections, novellas, omnibus are all major books. You know, 20 books to 50K thinking…) Publishing for this challenge is getting it up on Bookfunnel because I need everything there I will need to make them wide, and a lot of these I want to use for Kickstarters, bundle exclusives (2 are together in an exclusive Storybundle.com right now) and a ton of other things like getting many of them to my Patreon backers. So Bookfunnel is my publishing mark.

In doing this, I am trying to clean up decades of neglect of my short fiction by putting about 530 short stories into 53 ten-story collections.

By the way, on the Kickstarter I did for some of the science fiction collections, just have five more to do and I will get out all 15 of those collections to everyone who backed that campaign. Getting closer.

So here on August 10th, I have 29 books done. Considering that the first six months was mostly learning curves and cleaning up the last of the business crap we have been dealing with for years, I am happy with that number.

I am now focused on the collections. I have done 13 of the 53, so around 40 collections left, which will put me at 69 if only 40 collections left. The collections are running between 45,000 and 55,000 words. They will make great paper and hardback editions next year What a set that will be?

Can I get 46 books done in exactly three months?? I think so.

Each collection takes me about an hour to put the collection together, another hour to track down all the short stories and get them into one file folder, another hour to write sales copy and an introduction and do a cover, another hour to clean them all up and get them into one word file with the introduction. And about two hours to do Vellum and load the collection to Bookfunnel for a landing page.

So six hours per collection. Finding the actual story files I have the titles for on a spread sheet is often the hardest part. What a mess I created over the decades.

13 weeks left. If I do 3 collections per week I will not make it, but I will be close. So I will need to pick up speed to doing 4 some weeks. And find 6 more books that I can work in, or find six more collections, which is possible.

Below is the image of the 29 covers where I am at today with exactly three months left to go.