A love a good statistic, don’t you? No? Oh well, please yourselves. But I do; always have. Not in any kind of obsessive way you understand, Lord no, not like those people who can tell you the exact time of the winning goal from every FA Cup final ever and who scored it and with what part of their anatomy, or who can tell you every number one UK chart record since time immemorial and which record it knocked off the top spot and how many weeks it remained there. No, I’m not quite that anal, although, if you saw how I arrange my CD collection you might disagree with that.

The statistics I’m mostly interested in are my own. I check my stats on the KDP, Podbean and Anchor dashboards every single day; sometimes several times a day. Often, this makes for depressing and lonely reading when I see the number zero, but at other times gives me a bit of a frisson when I see those sales and downloads.

Just recently, I don’t know why, I thought about another statistic. What, I wondered, is the total word count for all six of my independently-published novels (I prefer that phrase to self-published, so much more refined).

So, this very morning I tallied them up and it reads like this.

Ah Boy – 94788 words

The Ghost of Lenton Wattingham – 80253 words

The Pheasants Revolt – 93834 words

Mutch Wants Moor – 75695 words

Hot Eire – 91060 words

Vole – 74189 words

That makes a grand total of…

509799 words!!!

Yes, I said WOW as well when I added it all up. 509,799 words in four years. That’s just over half a million. Half-a-bloody-million!!! My mind is blown just at the sheer scale of that figure. I mean, mathematics was never my bag as my erstwhile and skilful self-esteem lowering maths teachers would no doubt happily testify, but we’ve all got calculators on our computers and I’ve no reason to suppose that mine is lying.

To think, that I have sat at this tired and knackered old budget laptop, that cost less than £200 nine years ago, and four-finger tapped out half a million words just doesn’t seem credible. And yet here we are with the statistics to prove it. It’s amazing that I have any fingerprints left.

This also means that by the time I reach book number twelve (God willing) I could actually have written over a million words. I tell you it blows my mind. And that’s not even including all the blog posts I’ve written.

So I’m going to indulge myself now and call myself a “Prolific Author” and why not.