Merry Christmas!

Wishing all you readers a very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!

This will be my last website update before Christmas, so I thought I’d wish you guys a very happy Christmas and New Year — and a happy festive period for all those who don’t celebrate Christmas, of course.

I hope that your family celebrations are not curtailed too much by the ongoing pandemic. Here in the UK, things are looking a little more serious with the Omicron variant spreading rapidly, but fingers crossed we’ll be okay. I’m getting my booster today, and would encourage anyone else to do the same if you get the opportunity.

It’s been a good year for me creatively, I would say, after a rather COVID-hit 2020.

I’ve put out two novels — ‘A Girlfriend for Us Both‘ and ‘The Swap‘ — along with a third novel written with the most excellent Kenny Wright, ‘The Wife I Didn’t Know‘.

I’ve experimented with Large Print Editions, which as far as I know, have not been massively popular, but never mind!

Shorts

This year I dipped my toe back in the Kindle Unlimited (KU) pool with a series of short stories/novelettes for Amazon’s subscription service — and on the whole, I can report that the numbers don’t really justify continuing with KU.

As much as I’d like to provide stories for KU readers, it would mean taking them away from non-Amazon readers, under Amazon’s exclusivity rules. What I’ve found with my trial is that the boost in KU reads from putting new stories on there does not significantly offset the loss in non-Amazon reads.

I am going to try and continue putting a new ebook out every month, however, as that seems to be working well. You can already pre-order the next one, a novelette entitled ‘Hope and Glory‘, which comes out on January 1.

This, and future stories, will be available for Apple Books, Kobo and Nook readers as well as Amazon and all the usual major online bookstores.

Medium

In the last few months I have been trying out Medium.com as a place to find new readers, and so far I have been pleasantly surprised by it. I tried out some short stories, and there was some interest there, but the real interest has come for a longer story, My Best Friend’s Wife. I’ve been putting out 4,000-word episodes every Monday, and there has been a good amount of readers so far, so that is fantastic.

Today I’ve put out Episode Seven of My Best Friend’s Wife and I’ll continue putting out new episodes every Monday until the story is complete.

I’m currently writing Episode 11, and the story as a whole has now passed the 40,000 word mark, so it will be a novel when it is done, rather than a novel. My current feeling is that there are probably two or three more episodes left to write.

Currently I’m on track to put the full novel out as an ebook/paperback on February 1, 2022.

2022

One disappointment for me this year has been that I haven’t managed to complete the sequel to ‘A Girlfriend for Us Both‘. You can’t always guarantee that inspiration will keep going for a particular project, I find. That one was hit by a touch of pandemic fatigue. But, I’m going to try to sit down and devote January to writing it, and hopefully it will come along soon.

Looking ahead, I’m hoping that 2022 will be another fruitful year with new stories each month if all goes well. I will be continuing to put stories up on Medium once a week — or, very likely, weekly episodes of longer stories, since that has been the most popular approach so far. After My Best Friend’s Wife is complete, I already have another story in mind to serialize on Medium.

So that’s it for 2021, thanks so much for reading and supporting my writing with your time this year. Hopefully we’ll be out of the pandemic soon, and things will pick up again out in the real world.

All the best!

Max