publishing

Draft 2 Digital Have Partnered With Bookshop.org!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

All my titles are now being published to Bookshop.org

my books in a connected universe! Image is mine

Just a quick one this week folks! I thought I would let you know the exciting news that Draft 2 Digital have partnered with Bookshop.org which is fantastic news for indie authors like myself.

Bookshop.org launched in 2020 as an Amazon alternative and champion of independent book shops and indie authors. As an indie author I could have added my books to it back then but I never got around to it. However, I recently had an email from the team at Draft 2 Digital announcing their new partnership with Bookshop.

The good news is all I had to do was check a box and now all of my titles will be published and available on Bookshop.org in ebook and paperback. Draft 2 Digital is fast becoming a far more enticing place to be for indie authors and the link with Bookshop.org means our readers have even more places to find our books and avoid supporting Amazon if they wish to.

The whole process of uploading ebooks and formatting paperbacks on Draft 2 Digital is far preferable to the Amazon experience. I also much prefer their paperbacks to Amazon’s.

These days, perhaps because I largely only share the universal book links Draft 2 Digital generate for me, I get most of my sales through platforms other than Amazon. It makes me wonder if we even need Amazon anymore, which is something I never thought I would say.

I’m going to wait and see what happens with Bookshop.org. My books are not on there yet but it says ‘publishing’ on my Draft 2 Digital dashboard. It may be that in the future I ditch the evil ‘Zon for good.

That would feel good, to be honest! Amazon are famously terrible for indie authors, appalling at sorting out problems and communicating and we all know they are not an ethical company whatsoever.

I’ll see what happens but personally I would love to dump them.

What do you think?

Writing and Life Goals for 2026!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

What do I hope to achieve in the year ahead?

Image by Wilfried Pohnke from Pixabay

Hello everyone! I hope you have had a truly happy and peaceful holiday season and may I wish you a very happy New Year! My last post saw me checking the goals I set myself at the start of 2025 and exploring the reality of whether I met them or not! I failed two, achieved six, and half-achieved two, which I thought was pretty good.

So, let’s not hang about. What do I want to achieve in writing and in life in 2026?

  1. Publish The Dark Finds You in January 2006! – This won’t be hard to achieve as the pre-order is already set up for the 9th January. I’m giving myself an easy start…
  2. Start final/final edits for Black Hare Valley Book 1 and release it May 1st 2026: I really hope I achieve this as I want this book to be released on 1st May because May Day is a very important day in the Black Hare Valley universe! Book 1 is with my editor right now so fingers crossed…
  3. Release another anthology written by the kids I work with – Not long after publishing The World You Gave Us, we launched another collaborative writing project where all the stories and poems had to be set in a strange town called Lakeside View. At the time of writing I am waiting for a handful of longer stories to come in and hope to have all editing and formatting done by the start of February…
  4. Finish The Dark Finds You sequel – This should be easy. I am almost at the end of the first draft of the book that wasn’t meant to happen. I would like to get this ready to go to the editor in 2026 with a possible release date of autumn 2026…
  5. Continue to edit/rework the rest of the Black Hare Valley series: At the moment I’m not sure how close I want to release each of the 5 books, so there is no major goal being set for publication after book 1… However, I do need to keep working on the rest of them and prioritise this series over everything else!
  6. Start the rewrite of The 7th Child – I recently finished the first draft of this family mystery drama and hated it by the end. I know how to fix it though and it needs a major rewrite. I was all ready to dive into this when the sequel for The Dark Finds You suggested itself! However, I really want to start the rewrite at some point this year…
  7. Continue to stick to Substack and make a few changes, and continue to stick with Medium: It’s always hard figuring out where and how to prioritise your time as a writer. Is it writing for other platforms that might make you money and/or improve your visibility? Or is just writing your own books? I’ve enjoyed both Medium and Substack in 2025 and I plan to stick with them with no particular pressure to do better. Just to have fun. I do have a few changes in mind for Substack though.
  8. Have my best year in the garden ever!!: Oh, I hope so. This might be my most important goal actually. I have worked really hard through the autumn preparing the vegetable patch for the spring and summer and I feel more determined than ever to do really well. I also see it as an emergency. We can’t rely on governments to address or slow down climate change, or help us adapt to it! I am really concerned about rising food prices and food security in general. The best thing we can all do is at least grow something. I also plan to get more ducks and chickens, plant more fruit trees and bushes and lots more herbs!
  9. Complete a reading challenge: I haven’t done one in ages but an author I know created one on Storygraph where you have to read a book starting with each letter of the alphabet. This seemed fun and simple so I signed up! Let’s hope I manage to complete the alphabet!
  10. Get better at sketching: This is partly because I dearly want each chapter of each Black Hare Valley book to start with a small ink sketch and partly because I used to love drawing as a child and it’s been fun to reclaim it. I did basic drawings for the chapters I serialised but they all need to be much better for publication! I hope to find a good YouTube tutorial that will help me…

So, there you have it! A real mix of writing related and general life goals for 2026. I am so excited to get started! Do you have any hopes or dreams for the year ahead? Please feel free to share in the comments!

Happy New Year!!

Should I Serialise My Work-In-Progress?

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

A fun way to gain new readers or a huge piracy risk?

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

I’ve been feeling the urge for a while now to serialise my work-in-progress. I’m not sure which one. Perhaps Black Hare Valley Book 1 – testing the waters before it’s eventual release. Or perhaps a book I’ve not written yet – in other words, I’ll write a chapter each week and share it’s progress as it happens.

I’m not sure where this urge came from other than the fact I’ve seen other authors doing this and thought it looked fun. It could potentially be a cool way to gain interest and new readers. It could bring me some useful feedback too. It would be a nice incentive to write. And, I’ve sort of done it before.

If you’ve followed my blog from it’s very early days you’ll remember me sharing The Boy With The Thorn In Its Side chapter by chapter, way, way before it was published. This blog was the first part of my author platform to exist and sharing my work back then was scary but exciting! Nothing bad came of doing that either. In fact, I got regular supportive comments and those early readers gave me the confidence to keep going. I also wrote The Tree Of Rebels straight onto Wattpad, sharing a chapter a week until it was written. The final book I released was a more polished version.

These days though, I worry more about the risks of posting a future book like this. I recently found out that one of my books has been illegally pirated onto the LibGen site. This is the site Meta has been scraping books without the author’s permission, and without any payment to the author, to use the data to train its AI models. There is a court battle on the horizon that will affect us all.

My books being pirated and illegally downloaded is horrible enough, but the thought of a book not yet published being stolen in this way worries me more. I guess it didn’t worry me so much back in the day because I was just starting out. I wasn’t even sure I would ever publish anything at that point.

But now… I’d feel sick if I shared a work-in-progress only to have it stolen by someone else.

I guess I’m writing this to ask if anyone has any advice? I’d like to know if readers would be interested in this sort of thing. Would you like to receive a chapter a week as a book is being written? Would you prefer something like that to be free? Or do you think it’s something I should only offer to paid subscribers? Does anyone know how best I could protect the work against theft?

And finally, if I did do it, what would you be more interested in? Black Hare Valley which is written but not ready for release…. Or something brand new, something I write on the go, just for you?

Let me know!

Indie Writers Are The Bravest Writers I Know

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments
Image by Alexa from Pixabay

Last week I posted about how risk and courage go hand in hand with writing and I stand by that. It is incredibly brave to write at all and even braver to share that with the world. But in my view and in my experience, indie writers are perhaps the bravest of all.

Let’s look at what indie writers willingly put themselves through in order to get their stories out there for you to read and let’s also remind ourselves of what is involved in being an indie author these days.

  • First, the indie writer writes and finishes their book. This is in contrast to the 97% of people who start writing a book and never finish it.
  • Before becoming an indie, most but not all indie writers try the traditional route. They will have sent out to hundreds of agents and hundreds of small presses. They may have entered numerous competitions. Anything to try and get a foot in the trad door. But to no avail. They don’t give up there though. That’s how brave they are. They are not quitters.
  • They decide to go indie. This means different things to different people but ultimately it means the author is in control of their book, including the editing and proofreading, the blurb, the front cover and marketing it. Scary and brave, especially in the beginning!
  • If they haven’t already, they will start and build multiple social media pages with their blog or website at the forefront of their news and writing. This takes a lot of time and commitment and it is hard starting with 0 followers, yet they do it anyway, even if they are talking to themselves most of the time!
  • When it comes to their book, they will do multiple drafts if they care about the craft of writing and they will send it out to beta readers for honest feedback.
  • They’ll respond to this feedback and revise the book again. More edits may follow until they are happy enough to send it to an editor and/or proofreader.
  • Meanwhile, they’ll be battling with the blurb, sourcing possible front covers at reasonable prices or learning how to make their own.
  • They will start learning how to market their book. They will start trying to figure out where and who their audience is. This is both time consuming and scary. Writers are introverts at heart so it takes some guts to start shouting, look at me! Read my book!
  • Once the book is back from the editor they will do final edits and proofreads and then decide on a release date
  • They’ll also decide whether to go exclusive with Amazon and make sure their book is available on multiple platforms in multiple formats.
  • They will set up a pre-order for the book and start marketing as best they can!
  • In reality, most of them won’t make back the money they have spent getting it this far, but that won’t stop the indie author. They will already be writing the next one.
  • Sadly, the majority of the indie author’s close friends and family won’t buy, read, review or even respond to their exciting book news, so they will have to rely on the kindness of strangers and random readers on the internet.
  • The indie writer might be feeling quite demoralised by now, but they’ll keep going. Brave, you see.
  • The indie writer faces endless hurdles. In order to market their book they need money and if they don’t have money, they have to do whatever they can for free. This puts them at an instant disadvantage but it won’t stop them. No way. They are resilient and will find a way to keep going.
  • The hurdles never stop coming and they just seem to be getting worse. They now have to compete with AI as well as other authors, and traditionally published authors. A bit of a slap in the face, if you ask me, but the indie writer won’t give up or give in. Especially not to bots! No way. The indie author is here to stay.

I think I could go on for a while listing the hurdles indie writers face, and the very many ways in which they prove themselves to be the bravest of writers. They overcome rejection and keep going. They learn how to produce, format and market their own book, and don’t give up even if it fails. They are largely unsupported by family and friends, but don’t let that stop them and now they have AI coming for their jobs…

I mean, maybe we’re all just a bit mad, rather than brave!

What do you think?