Hello, dear reader who is ready for a new year,
Above, you see Mochi rolling ecstatically in wrapping paper. My family did Christmas at my house this year, and the boys loved every minute of it. So many crinkling things! So much ribbon! My 7-yield-old niece brought a stuffy that Mochi repeatedly tried to abscond with. Taro received a reindeer custom, which he endeared for photographs. Then his brother stole it and avenged his honor by playing with the costume as though it were a luckless mouse. They drank all the pine-flavored water they could manage. They had a most excellent Christmas.
The Year Behind Us
Last year was a mixed bag. Both in my anesthesia career and in my author career, I kept trying to go in specific directions, and I feel like I was repeatedly cut off and sent on strange detours. Part of this is on me for wanting comforting and familiar things, and part of it is systemic issues directly related to the pandemic.
I’m not going to dwell on that. I’ve got ambitious plans for 2023. Let’s look at what I did accomplish in 2022.
Writing
I wrote 173,675 words this year, which is decent for me, but not a record-breaker.
I wrote on 107 days, which is on the lower end.
On days that I wrote anything at all, I averaged 1,623 words, which is on the higher end for me. That number has been creeping up since 2020, which is encouraging.
I finished writing Arcove’s Bright Side and my lion essays
I wrote Legacy, a 70K novel that comes after Bright Side (happens about 2.5 years later).
I knew when I finished that the novel that it would be published as part of a collection. It needed a few additional short stories to add context and clarity. I finished the first of those stories, “Den Mates,” near the end of the year, and I’m well into the second one (which doesn’t have a name yet).
I also wrote a fair bit on The Sleipner Drive books, but I didn’t finish any of them.
Publishing/ Production
I published The Knight and the Necromancer Complete Trilogy paperback with new artwork near the beginning of the year (artist goes by Asmodeus, design by Jeff McDowall) and followed it up with a hardback edition (my first hardback with KDP Print). This book looked great, so I proceeded with more hardback experiments.
I published Lullaby (Hunters Universe #2) in ebook, audio, paperback and hardback. (This was written the year before, but the editing wasn’t complete until the very end of the previous year.)
I published Distraction (Hunters Universe #3) in ebook, audio, paperback, and hardback. (Same situation as Lullaby.)
I published Arcove’s Bright Side (Hunters Universe #4) in ebook, audio, paperback, and hardback.
I published the original Hunters Unlucky novel (Book #1) in hardback. All of these hardbacks were done near the end of the year, and I was pleased with how they turned out (except that I haven’t seen the last one yet, on account of how extraordinarily long it takes Amazon to print and ship hardbacks).
I commissioned additional silhouette art from Jeff McDowall for the interiors of the Hunters Hardbacks. It’s also worth noting that Iben Krut’s covers for the follow-on books look amazing in hardback. Sarah Cloutier’s original cover for book 1 is also lovely in that format.
The audio deserves an extra bullet point. Rish Outfield did all of it, and it’s exceptional. That was a lot of audio this year.
I received the final artwork for the Adagio collection (a republication of Crossroads, with the addition of the title story). These short stories are all related to The Prophet of Panamindorah. The title story is one my best MM short stories IMO, but it’s kind of inside baseball (related to a rather obscure trilogy). The Patreon loved that story, and I’m so happy to finally have it out with a luxuriously gorgeous cover. Artwork for this one is Graham Schmidt and Sarah Clouter, design is Jeff McDowall.
Advertising/ Promotion
I did very little conventional advertising this year. I let one tried and true FB ad run on autopilot. That’s about it. But I was busy on other aspects of promotion.
I doubled down on direct sales via Payhip. I got all my ebooks, audiobooks, and paper books listed. I considered switching to Shopify, but in the end decided to remain with Payhip for now.
I made adjustments to the way I run my newsletter and use my website.
I mostly stopped linking to retailers.
At the same time, I went wide with audio and ebooks, listing them on retail sites large and small.
TikTok is the place where most authors are having the most promotional success this year. I took a course and learned the ropes, only to back away quickly. My gut feeling is that I do not enjoy using the platform, therefore I’m not sure I can stand to spend the amount of time necessary to have success there. But I might give it another shot at some point this year.
Tumblr continues to be a repository of a lot of new fan art, mostly related to Hunters Unlucky, but also Panamindorah. I try to be interactive over there, because it’s super inspiring when someone spends that much time thinking about my characters. I’m sure it has caused new readers to take an interest in those books.
Personal Achievements
Starting in July, I lost nearly 30 pounds and got myself back down to what I weighed in my twenties. This is also considered a healthy BMI. I lowered my risk for cancer, reduced my back and hip pain, eliminated my heartburn, and enjoyed shopping for cuter clothes. I’ve never lost that much weight on purpose before, and it was inspiring to do something that I didn’t know I could do. I will not bore you with the details of how I did it, but, in brief: aggressive calorie counting, intermittent fasting, and keto. Also, being a scientist and doing experiments on myself, because that is way more fun than dieting.
One of my goals last year was to travel more for pleasure and see more of my friends. I did that. In January, I took a trip to Hawaii with my mom that we had originally planned for 2020. I saw breaching whales for the first time, which was magical. I took a trip to Tucson with family/friends in April. I took a trip to visit friends on the east coast in Nov. I also hosted friends from FL in May, August, and Nov. This really felt like coming out of the dark after the isolation of the previous two years and the sputtering stop/start previous attempts to reconnect.
Author Goals for 2023
Finish the short stories that go with Legacy and get it published.
Work with voice actors to get Cormorant audio finished.
Write and publish the Sleipner Series.
Write every day.
If I do that last thing, I’ll write a lot more than the books I just mentioned, but, like losing 30 pounds, it’s something I’ve never done before.
Figure out how long it takes me to write a novel. It’s embarrassing that I don’t know this, but I find it extremely intrusive to time my writing sessions. As a result, I have no idea how many hours of labor each of my books represents. Without that critical detail, it’s hard to approach writing like a business. I’ve taken some steps to make it easier to keep a timer running, and I hope to have a better understanding of my own creative speed over the next few months. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as time = words. The longer my writing sessions go, the faster I typically write. I know this already. So why do I not write for 10 hours a day? Length of session has to be balanced against back pain, wrist pain, and getting anything else done. I think that 3 hours per day is a good number if I want to average 2,000 words (with at least one break in the middle) but I don’t actually know this for certain.
Improve my transition strategies between projects. I’m quite good at zipping along when I’m in the middle of something, but I have a terrible time letting go of one set of characters and latching onto another. I flail around between projects, sometimes for months, and this is where I lose momentum. I’ve got to learn to stop that.
Behave like I want to win.
Finally, I give you Taro in his reindeer costume. There are more Christmas photos of them on Insta, including another costume.
Yours, An Author Plotting a New Year
