January 1st 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I made some last minute additions and released the book on Kindle.
December 28th 2022 An Astronomer's Year/Forthcoming Hiatus
It was with a heavy heart that I ran the spell/grammar check and generated the table of contents. The weather until the end of the year was predicted to be cloud and rain but I did not release the book. There was always the chance of a last minute bit of clear sky but, otherwise, everything was ready to pull the trigger.
The emotional part that it was to be my last book, for the forseeable future. It was time to move on, in my writing and astronomy and, to some extent my life, although I was not going to split from my wife or move house. After a difficult year, with many issues set to come to a head in 2023. The danger with many writers, at least those of us fortunate enough to be published, is that we sometimes lose our relevance to the outside world and I felt that I was losing mine. I realised that if I continued to write (and there was some doubt about that!) I would need to reinvent myself.
During my semi-hiatus, about to become a full one, I had started doing some marketing activities, such as my online calendar:
I liked to think that there was still a lot of useful information in my books and most were still selling but it was time for a new Phil and a new direction for the new year.
December 11th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I wrote the November entry of my annual summary, my last book for a while. Here is a selection of images from the month.
November 26th Astronomical Calendar
Yes, I have completed it and here is the official release:
Naturally, if I become aware of any other astronomical events, religious days, days of world or national importance. I will be updating it.
November 18th Semi-Hiatus
As previously announced, I am taking a break from writing,
with the exception of my annual summary. With sales being quite low, I needed
time to think hard about what I wanted to do with my writing and how I was
going to do it. The transition from part-time back to full-time work has
severely restricted the time I have to write, observe and blog. The other side
is that I like the job I’m doing and am reluctant to leave.
My book revenue is hardly worth the effort I am putting in
but then very few astronomy books by other authors are selling well. Authors
must realise that, during times of financial hardship, that very few people are
able or willing to buy books, when they are struggling with their monthly
bills. I have decided to publish my 2022 summary “2022 An Astronomer’s Year”,
mostly because I have been updating it monthly. However, I will monitor its
sales before deciding whether it is worth doing a 2023 version.
During my semi-hiatus, which will become a full hiatus once “2022 An Astronomer’s Year” is out, I have been looking at different social media outlets and have opened an account on Pinterest to share the best of my astronomical images: (1) Pinterest. I am trying to do this to market my books, which most of us self-published authors find hard and sometimes a chore. I’m also hoping to get more sales on my traditionally published books, soon.
I have also added a lot more to my calendar, which is
getting read worldwide: Philip
Pugh's Astronomical Calendar (epizy.com).
I have also been learning new astronomy tools and techniques
that will probably result in a future edition of “Astronomy with a DSLR”, which
has been my most successful self-published book so far:
However, if (and PROBABLY) when I resume writing, I will
produce a new edition of “Being an Astronomer”: Being
an Astronomer: Fourth Edition 4, Pugh, Philip - Amazon.com. This will also
probably be a paperback release, too.
I have no plans to write another novel. It was a story that
I wanted to tell but, probably because it was a “non-genre” novel and my
astronomy books did not encourage people to buy my novel, it has flopped. I
have had several ideas for a follow-up but I need to look more about how to fit
into a genre, as it might be easier to sell. In any case, I decided that I
could not consider writing another novel while working full-time.
2022 an Astronomer's Year November 2nd
I wrote the October entry. Despite the solar eclipse, the highlight was the meteor shots, despite the eclipse.
Calendar October 22nd
I have now finished the prototype of my calendar for January 2023:
Calendar October 16th
I am now only working on my annual summary "2022 An Astronomer's Year". I am working on my website and will be looking at my social media engagement. The latest addition to my website is my calendar and have started the January 2023 entry:
2022 an Astronomer's Year October 3rd
I wrote the September entry.
Astronomy with a DSLR September 24th
Fingers crossed! I have submitted the book to Kindle. It came out on Kindle the next evening:
2022 an Astronomer's Year September 14th
I finally managed to write the August entry. It had been a busy month, with meteor captures, planets and some deep sky shots. Here are just some highlights.
Astrophotography with a DSLR September 12th
I finally finished my 8th round of edits. Perhaps the redeeming fact was that all of the edits were for the sections that I had added on the 4th edition. You can probably guess what was coming next. But before the 9th round of edits, I had the small matter of the August additions to "2022 An Astronomer's Year".
Astrophotography with a DSLR September 3rd
I got to halfway through the 7th round of edits. I did not create any new headings or subjects but did a lot of edits. An example is where I explained where ISO settings originate from (film cameras).
On one hand, I sincerely believe that the 4th edition is so much better than the 3rd, especially with the inclusion of worked examples but my idea of an autumn launch is now looking further away than ever.
Funny, at work, people raise their eyebrows when I talk about 2nd and 3rd rounds of edits and I can see an 8th and even 9th on my astronomy book. Is something wrong with me?
Astrophotography with a DSLR August 27th
I finally finished the 6th round of edits. For a 4th edition, this must be an appalling statistic. I found enough changes to justify a 7th round. Most edits were editorial, many of which had persisted since the first edition.
I considered adding some new content but I was determined to get the edition finished before the autumn resurgence of astronomy.
The “Not Writing” Blog August 22nd
Many of us, as children, want to become writers when we grow
up. Well some of us did but a common theme is that we have become writers and
yet are constantly making excuses NOT to write. Many cite “writer’s block”
whilst others, like me, are trying to juggle work and family life. Few of us
have the luxury of “ring fencing” time for writing and, I suspect, that time
will often be taken up by a spouse needing an “urgent” task to be done or “important”
e-mails from work that “cannot be delayed”.
OK, get the picture. I have another reason for not writing,
in addition to the above. My writing is primarily about astronomy, these days,
although I have written other genres in the past. In order to write about
astronomy, I need to “do” astronomy. This is primarily going out and taking
photographs. Astronomy readers expect these, as a right. Not only does it mean
taking them but careful editing and processing of them, too. August has been an
especially busy month. Some of my photographs will, naturally, find their way
into my books, whilst most others or “best of the rest” will find their way
into my blog.
Having said that, I really wanted my main work in progress,
the 4th edition of “Astronomy with a DSLR” to be finished by now. I
am on about the 6th round of edits, probably about four too much
already, and still making editorial (although, thankfully, not content)
changes. I an doing this while my laptop chirps away at some image processing
tasks. Is a September launch likely? Probably more one for the Christmas
stocking or the January rush to spend book tokens given as Christmas presents.
I am a realist, after all!
August 3rd Astronomy with a DSLR/2022 An Astronomer's Year
I completed the third round of edits for the 4th edition of "Astronomy with a DSLR".
I also completed the July entry for "2022 An Astronomer's Year". It had been a mixed month, the highlight being my best photo of the star cluster Melotte 20 in Perseus.
July 24th Astronomy with a DSLR/2022 An Astronomer's Year
The huge gap between the previous blog post and this one was no co-incidence, Life was just too busy, although some of it was capturing sand processing astronomical images. As it turned out, the weekend of 23rd/24th July was a complete washout and greyout for astronomy and quite quiet otherwise. I FINALLY completed the 2nd round of edits for the 4th edition of "Astronomy with a DSLR". I also finally caught up with the June entry for "2022 An Astronomer's Year" and included a photo of a double rainbow.
May 19th Astronomy with a DSLR
I finished the first round of edits after having completed the first draft. The previous edition took 9 rounds of edits, so I will see how this goes.
May 17th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I was busy with solar and lunar shots and included some selected ones in my annual summary. This one shows two close-ups of the Moon.
May 5th Astronomy with a DSLR
I finished what I was going to do with the book by writing a processing example of COMET NEOWISE F3 from July 2020.
Then it was time to check, maybe add the odd bit but mostly check to see how the book fits together.
May 3rd 2022 An Astronomer's Year
After a spurt of activity on April 29th, I finally finished my write-up for the month. Here's a few highlights. Well, for some reason I can only post one for now!
April 23rd 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I had not done any writing for a while, as I was busy with astronomy. On a cloudy Saturday night, I caught up with photo processing and added some new images to the book.
The first was a long-awaited Moon photo using my Maksutov telescope and DSLR.
April 5th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I brought my annual astronomy summary up-to-date. One of the photos was a widefield view of the star cluster M35.
March 30th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
Two weeks since my last update. No progress on "Astrophotography with a DSLR" at all but I spent a lot of time image processing and I finally caught up with my annual summary. Numerically, March had been a poor month for astrophotography but I managed a few quality photos for the book.
March 16th Update
For the foreseeable future, I went back to work full-time, Naturally, this impacted my writing but I managed to get some photos for my annual summary. I also used a photo of Venus as a processing example for "Astrophotography with a DSLR".
February 23rd Update and a Writer's Dilemma
For regular visitors to my blog, you will be aware of my annual astronomy summaries that give an overview of each month, showing my best photos and observations. Well, naturally, I have been adding to it, plus some reprocesses of photos from previous years.
This is where my next work in progress comes in. I have written a book called "Astrophotography with a DSLR", as regulars know. One thing that non-fiction writers almost all need to do is update their books. In recent years, I have found out that there are far more objects that you can photograph with a DSLR camera that I could imagine when I wrote the first edition. I have now reached the fourth edition and have also decided to tackle the difficult issue of photo processing. In a nutshell, astronomers process photographs to bring out more detail and also combine several images into one. A simple, everyday example was when I took several photographs of the British Telecom Tower from bottom to top and combined them into a single photograph showing the whole tower.
This will now expand the work from a booklet into a fully-fledged, full-sized book. However, in order to explain image processing, I am providing worked examples (many completed) and two "reference" sections on the two main processing tools I use. These sections (one in progress) will be huge and a lot of work. In fact, I feel quite daunted by what lies ahead of me. As the book is self-published, I do not have a planned release date. In fact, due to circumstances I am not currently ready to divulge, it could be a year before it reaches the shelves. Much of the work is already done, especially making the content suitable for paperback release, as it is my most successful self-published work so far.
I had considered writing the reference sections in a later edition but felt that the book would not meet its original objectives and could put less experienced astronomers and photographers off! So the moral of the story, is I will complete the book but do not hold your breath while waiting.
Meanwhile, do not expect a second novel from me anytime soon.
February 15th The Road Map
One fault most writers have is that we love to daydream about getting our book or magazine article out there but we are great at procrastinating. I like to share ideas with other writers and that is a major distraction. However, at the time of writing I was processing photographs from an astronomy photo session and one of the processes takes several hours.
So, here goes, one of my tips for writers. Conventional wisdom suggests that you should concentrate on one book at a time. As a first-time writer, I would agree. Many people write a single book and, for various reasons, never write anything else. Those of us who are writers, aspiring or established, aim to write more than one book.
This is where the road map comes in. It is a set of ideas of what you will do when you finish your book (or magazine article). It may exist only in your head, a file on your computer or you may even share it online. It may be simple or detailed. A detailed road map may include tasks such as building a website or an Amazon page. It may also turn out that your road map may change. That is not admitting some sort of "fail". Especially early in my writing days, I would often shelve a project for something that was in my (or a publisher's) opinion more saleable or often simply more interesting. While some of us write mostly to be read, we also like to make some money from it. For example, an opportunity to do some paid magazine work came up in 2019, so I rescheduled my books in progress. Also, if you get a book deal, that needs to take priority over that fantastic book that is likely to sell less than 20 copies on Kindle.
Where a project will be published, you need to remember that book and magazine publishers set deadlines because they need to allocate resources. The route for traditionally published works is long and complex and I had no idea when I started out. I must admit that, especially with my first book, I had severe problems with work/writing/life balance. Not meeting a deadline may result in no further work from that publisher. So, to sum up, any paid work must come first and anything speculative must be firmly on the back burner, although there is nothing wrong with keeping a list of ideas for when you do get to write something without a publishing deadline.
One debate on #WritingCommunity on Twitter is daily word count. If you have a publishing contract and you are writing something based on text, you need to keep on track with the word count. I would suggest that weekly word count is more realistic, as you are more likely to write more on your days off. In my case, page count is a more realistic measure of progress, as astronomy books (these days) must contain a lot of photographs. On the other hand, novels tend to have a word count determined by genre and publishers like to keep within 5-10% of that word count.
But that does not apply to me now. The only deadline I have is to publish my annual summary early in January. It only has a limited interest early in the year. For that reason, I add to it whenever I make a particular observation or photograph. Otherwise, anything else does not have a fixed end date. You might find a summer romance novel is best released in January and a Christmas story in November.
So my road map is quite simple:
- I will release "2022 An Astronomer's Year" by January 7th 2023.
- I will work on the 4th edition of "Astrophotography with a DSLR" until I finish it. It is a major upgrade and it will cease to become a booklet and become a full-scale book.
- I don't really know after that but the two candidate projects are:
A 5th edition of my astronomy beginner book "Being an Astronomer". This will include a paperback version.
A yet unnamed sequel to "The Quantum God", a novel centred on one man's attempt to understand the world, nuclear physics and the universe.
I have not (yet) planned any periods where I will revisit my website or consider publishing to anywhere different to Amazon. Also, depending on other things going on in life, I may find that "2022 An Astronomer's Year" will come out first and then I will start "2022 An Astronomer's Year" almost immediately.
February 13th Astrophotography with a DSLR/2022 An Astronomer's Year
With a lack of clear sky, I am not getting to see or photograph anything, so am reprocessing older images. I am using these reprocesses to document photo processing techniques for the 4th edition of "Astrophotography with a DSLR". Naturally, these images also found their way into "2022 An Astronomer's Year",
February 10th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I updated this with images and the observation of Betelguese, which is a variable star that had been fading and re-brightening in contrary to its normal pattern.
I included a sunspot drawing.
I also added a reprocess of one of my favourite star clusters, known as Melotte 20, as it was the 20th entry in a Mr Melotte's list of interesting objects.
February 6th Astronomy with a DSLR
I produced a worked example of processing a photo of a thin crescent moon. These are the images from the initial capture on the camera to the final image.
February 5th Thoughts
Now apologies to the originator for forgetting who they are but I saw a very interesting post on Twitter. It asked whether we preferred to be an unpublished writer or a published writer worrying about sales. I can answer that one for myself and those who follow my blog will know that I fall into the latter camp!
For those of you who aren't on Twitter (no adverts here but I'd recommend it) there are several writers and we use hashtags like #WritingCommunity, #writing, #writers and #writerlift. The debates are lively but respectful. Nearly all of the writers on Twitter are novellists and most have a specific genre. Many are unpublished, some are self-published and others are traditionally published. Some (like me) are both traditionally published but also self-publish as well.
I was very surprised (and somewhat disappointed) that the post received few replies. I thought it was a good debate. Most of us have some altruistic reasons for writing but, equally, we all hope to make some money and, preferably enough to live off without needing to work.
The stark reality is that very few of us never make a full-time living from writing. Most who write make very little and getting traditionally published is quite rare. There is the opportunity to self-publish, which at least gives one the opportunity to be read.
One point that I remember from the post is that unpublished writers (especially novellists) have this dream that their first book will be a best seller and that all of the famous writers throughout history had to write and publish their first book. Strangely enough, experienced writers never lose this. We all feel that we are still "good" writers, even if our only customers are our workmates and family. We see our "failure" to sell as one of marketting. We did not research our target audience thoroughly enough, there were too many competing books and the reviewers were "marking us down" because they have their own similar book in progress.
Actually, I think marketting is the biggest sales failure of all. Of course, we all think our book is worth reading but how do we persuade the general public of that fact? That is the question!
Back to the original question: for many writers or aspiring writers, simply being published is one of our life goals, in my case from the age of six! That's one where I hit the net.
February 3rd General Update
One of the things about being a non-fiction writer is that there are times when we need to participate in our "Mastermind" specialist subject. As mine is astronomy, it is weather dependent and I had two especially clear, moonless nights, so I took (literally!) hundreds of photos and had to go through each one to look for signs of unusual activity. I got plenty of that with a few meteors and many unidentified flying objects.
So naturally, the most aesthetically pleasing and curious are finding their way into "2022 An Astronomer's Year". Some might even find their way into "Astrophotography with a DSLR". With cloudy skies, I had turned back to writing. It is amazing how much things had changed in astrophotography, especially techniques I had developed or improved.
January 27th Update
I had been slowly updating works in progress, mostly with reprocesses. Although I had photographed the Moon, the result was not good enough to include in the books.
The stand-out shot was the Moon with Mars.
January 19th 2022 Astronomy with a DSLR
As I published the third edition before the fortuitous appearance of Comet NEOWISE F3, I added a short commentary on how I took the photos. I have to admit I was very happy.
January 19th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
I photographed the Moon and was rather pleased with the result and included in the annual summary.
January 18th 2022 An Astronomer's Year and Astronomy with a DSLR
After taking some photos of the Sun and Moon, I updated both books. I am including all interesting photos in my annual summary. I used my Sun photo to describe step-by-step image processing. I did not use the Moon photo, as I already had an example with the Moon at a similar phase.
Here are the Sun and Moon shots for January 17th.
January 15th Astronomy with a DSLR
I had finished importing the previous edition into the new format and added a section showing photo processing of a difficult meteor image.
January 12th 2022 An Astronomer's Year
As I made some observations, took some photos and reprocessed some old ones, I updated my annual summary. Here are two of the photos I used, a recent one and a reprocessed Moon shot from April 2020.
January 10th Astronomy with a DSLR
It is amazing how much had changed since I wrote the last (3rd) edition. Some of my shots since were proof of concept shots and others were proof of concept shots that have become mainstream. I was especially pleased with my Venus and Mercury shots, which had been experiments that I never knew would work.
January 6th Astronomy with a DSLR/2022 An Astronomer's Year
I completed a major rewrite and expansion of "Astronomy with a DSLR". Before starting the next section, I kicked off "2022 An Astronomer's Year". I learned from experience that it was better to kick off and write as I made observations and take photographs than leaving it until the end of the month.
January 4th Astronomy with a DSLR
I wrote a whole section on processing constellation images. I need to add a lot more about stacking and Deep Sky Stacker.
January 2nd Astronomy with a DSLR
This is a continuation of my 2021 writing blog:
With "2021 An Astronomer's Year" done and dusted, I took on the major project of updating "Astrophotography with a DSLR". It was to be a major update, with new techniques and detail on photo processing.
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