Amanda L. Betley

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Filling the Bookshelves...

Not sure about you but empty bookshelves send me into a panic!

I’ve either just packed up to move house, which is super sad as I have to put all the books away for a while and the place feels empty. Either that or I’ve just installed the bookshelves in the new home and I now have to find time to unpack the 33 boxes of books and fit them back on the shelves!

Either way, it’s a lot of work.

Can you imagine trying to fill these bookshelves with your own published books? What would that take? Well because I had a few minutes spare I worked it out.

These shelves hold 24 books each at around 500 pages a book so you’d have to write 12,000 pages to fill one shelf! At 350 words per page for a standard fantasy fiction genre size, that’s 4.2 million words. That’s certainly more than a few weeks work. And that’s just one shelf!

So I’m going to outsource that job to a few of my favourite authors. Adding a few of my own titles to the shelf feels good but I’m definitely going to share the load.

I’ve written a few short stories and they don’t take up much room on the shelf, though they were fun to write. A very different tech to writing a novel. I occasionally break from a novel to do a short story just for the fun of it. It’s refreshing to do something different.

Although Sarah wouldn’t agree! More about her later.

Amanda xxx