This page is of interest to nobody, but I wanted to write down the calculation anyway.
Sometimes when you’ve written a few books people will ask ‘How many books have you written?’. It sounds like an extremely straightforward question.
But, because of some second editions, a co-authored book, and a couple of books I edited and wrote part of, but not all of, it ends up being surprisingly fuzzy and I often mutter some number but worry that it’s not really accurate.
Some authors definitely don’t care, and their biographies say they have written 12 books, when actually they have written maybe 3 single-authored books, and also have some co-authored and multi-authored books, books they edited but didn’t really write, and so on.
I don’t want to cheat like that though. Hence this counting up page!
Obviously, it’s not all about the numbers. Writing a couple of excellent books is far better than writing ten rubbish ones.
But anyway, here’s the numbers.
Single-authored, first edition books:
→ Moving Experiences: Understanding Television’s Influences and Effects (1995).
→ Video Critical: Children, The Environment and Media Power (1997).
→ Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (2002).
→ Creative Explorations: New approaches to identities and audiences (2007).
→ Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011).
→ Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research (2011).
→ Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn in Media and Communications Studies (2015).
→ Creativity: Seven keys to unlock your creative self (2022).
So that’s easy. There’s eight of those. Then there’s this book I wrote jointly with Annette Hill:
→ TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life (1999), written with Annette Hill.
That’s straightforwardly half a book, so we’re up to eight and a half.
Then there’s three second editions of single-authored books. Each of these includes substantial amounts of new material, as well as being revised throughout, so I’m counting each of those as one-third of a book, which seems fair, and quite modest because each one is a whole new book production.
→ Moving Experiences, Second edition: Media effects and beyond (2005).
→ Media, Gender and Identity: Second edition (2008).
→ Making is Connecting: The social power of creativity, from craft and knitting to digital everything – Second expanded edition (2018).
So now we’re up to nine and a half books.
Then there’s these two:
→ Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies For The Digital Age (2000). Editor.
→ Web.Studies, Second edition (2004). Editor, with Ross Horsley.
These were edited books, but I wrote significant chapters for each of them, and the two editions were entirely different. The World Wide Web developed so quickly that nothing in the 2004 edition had been in the 2000 edition. If I count each of those as one-quarter of a book, which is eye-wateringly modest given the work involved, we are up to ten books, and we can be certain that I haven’t cheated or used any of these things as padding to boost my total.
So: Ten whole books so far, counting only the work done by me.
This means that my next book, probably entitled Practice-Based Research and Research-Creation: An introductory guide, will be my 11th book.
That is the end of the counting!