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2024 in Review, 2025 Goals!
🕑 Added 2025-01-07 12:00:09 +0000 UTCMy habit of long-standing is to spend New Year's Day doing a little of all the things I hope to do over the coming year, and this was derailed by a two-day fever and subsequent recuperation period. In retrospect, there's nothing wrong with “spend 2025 recovering” as my theme for 2025 when I consider the stressors that have lately entered my life. I am going to run with that, thus, and say that I aim to spend 2025 recovering, waking up... and flourishing!
But first! I want to look back at what I managed in 2024. Several of you are going to take immediate issue with this characterization: 'if this is managing, then you are putting many people to shame!' And I thank you all for your protectiveness and charity. But in this case, I should be clear... as the sole income in the household, I should be releasing at least four books a year, if not more, so falling down on that metric makes all the rest of them immaterial. But it's because I fell down on that metric that I did so much wild experimentation in 2024, in hopes of finding a way to make my income depend less heavily on how fast I'm releasing (more on that later).
First, a round-up!
Art
Despite multiple constraints, I finished art this year, including a few large paintings (the Everglades Unicorn, and covers for the Qora novel and Bryer's novelette), and lots of small, tactical pieces, either painted (like the stickers for the Qora kickstarter, and the void cat stickers), or using markers. I didn't sketch as much as I planned, but I kept moving, which is the important part! And I also fixed one of the major issues with my ability to do art by getting new glasses, which is already paying dividends. I anticipate more artwork in 2025, but here's the list of the majors from 2024:
Cover for Qora Novel
Orange Cat
Everglades Unicorn
Kitty Kimono
Magnolia Mother
Void Cat
Stray Cats
Third Fireborn
Dancing Faulfenzair
Qora Wallpaper
Harrier’s Choice cover
Kat Redraw
Qora Dancing Frontispiece
Completionist Badge
Writing
“Just keep moving” was also my motto for writing in 2024, because I embarked on two complicated projects that required a lot of backstory and continuity research (the two Peltedverse books). Qora's novel in particular took me nearly 5 months of note-taking and researching, and I still made errors! (If you haven't noticed them, I'm not going to point them out!). So I only finished two novels. I did however start a third (the gamelit I am serializing on the patron platforms) and got over halfway through it. And to keep my hand in, I wrote four short stories and one novelette. I placed all four of those shorts with editors, along with an additional five short stories that were either trunked or reprints. I don't usually do sales to presses anymore, but I wanted to meet some new people and enjoy the burgeoning community dedicated to pulpier entertainment. Importantly, it was fun! I needed to remember that the art can be fun. As much as I love and believe in the novels I'm writing right now, the pressure to get them right, and the number of ways I can get them wrong, has made them more stressful than enjoyable. (I have enjoyed reading them once they were done, though, so even that stress had compensations.)
Here's the list from 2024:
Serial – gamelit
FireBorn’s Legacy
An Exile Amid Stars
Short – Sister Prissa’s Philters
Short – Tapa’s Adventure
Short – Black Hat
Short – Hate That Guy
Novelette – Harrier’s Choice
Anthology sales: 8 (9 if you count Brim to Dregs, sold in December, out in January)
Experiments
Now we get to the wild category, the Experimental things!
I ran five Kickstarters (four of them in a row, one per month!), just to see if it could be done and whether it was worth doing. The answers to that were 'it can be' and 'it's not particularly profitable but it was fun.' Useful data! I also have enough information to update my Kickstarter book, so that project's currently in progress.
I designed and prototyped my first special edition hardcover, which was exciting―I'm definitely doing more of those, and having the option feels very luxurious. Having a hardcover with foil stamping and ribbon and custom endpapers was a bucket list item for me, so checking it off was deeply satisfying. This was definitely one of the highlights of the year for me. Even better, art books have now opened up as an option!
Also in 2024, taking me nearly five months, I built and launched my direct sale shop... which is not a minor endeavor when you have some 70+ books in multiple formats to upload, tag, and connect to various on-demand-fulfillment arms. I learned a tremendous amount doing this (and probably have accidentally acquired an entirely new set of marketable skills, if I wanted to sell them). None of which is as important as the confidence it's given me about weathering any ups-and-downs in the retail sphere. I used to feel a lot more beholden to Amazon and other retailers; while it would be a hit to lose them, I no longer panic at the thought.
After talking about it for most of a year I finally started my Peradventure game beta in December, and that's in progress now―thank you, playtesters! I am taking a ton of notes on what's working and what's not. This first campaign is definitely less play and more discussion of how to play, but that's all to the good.
My last experiment of 2024 was to return to the con circuit, which I did as gently as possible by visiting the nearest relaxacon, NecronomiCon. Though one of the hurricanes seriously depressed attendance, it was still lovely to go and meet (and re-meet!) people, and to test my new author table set-up and sales hardware (also connected to Shopify).
Peering Forward
So that was 2024. To address 2025, you'll see why I ended 2024 with the Experimental section. Because my goal in 2025 is to increase my income dramatically, and I'm not going to grow it by doing the same things I've always done. Writing faster―all right, yes. I'd like to. But the books I've got on the docket need me to slow down to get them right, not speed up to get them out. (That would be the culmination of the Peltedverse story arcs; and even things like Kherishdar want immersion, not speed.) So I'm trying to find new ways to reach people, and my plan is something like this:
More Local and In-Person: I rarely do in-person events, which is odd because I like people and enjoy meeting and listening to them. This year I'm going to try expanding into the mall, which has a flea-market-like store that rents space to local vendors. I've rented a shelving unit for my books and I'm going to see if I can get more of a reputation as a local author. (I'd also be looking into doing this in the local bookstores but we no longer have any. The nearest bookstore is now 40 minutes away.) I also want to do more cons; I'm going to go to NecronomiCon again (that's in Florida in autumn), and this year, I should also be attending LibertyCon in Tennessee in the summer. Finally, there's a local coffee shop that just opened and I'm going to see if I can become a fixture there; I have, in the past, made a surprising number of sales via coffee shop interactions.
More Direct Sales and Interaction: I have built out the fiction part of my shop pretty well. I'd like to expand into artwork, merchandise, and more exclusive items―behind the scenes downloads, audio, whatever seems good to us all. Someone has also asked me to consider offering a direct subscription option to replace locals/patreon, so I've got that on my list to investigate. I also want to up the focus on interaction with me and other fans as part of what's fun about being invested in my work. The Discord has been growing well, with multiple read-alongs and good conversations now typical... and Peradventure is my other experiment there, because I really want to do the thousand players-to-one-GM game model and see where it goes! Peradventure is also part of the groundwork for fanwork of the kind I was previously leery of allowing... increasingly, though, I'm confident that there are enough people who care about getting it right that I can start to map out ground rules that will prevent legal and social problems. And I'd like to do more mentoring, and being senior editor for something like a themed anthology would be one way to embark on that. (Teaching is, come to think of it, another thing I'd like to do more often. We'll see if any opportunities arise there.)
More Preorders: This is a minor note, but a big bullet point in my list, because it was shocking to me how effective preorders are. Like “double the amount of sales, even if the preorder period is only a month long” effective. I don't yet have the data to tell if these sales are from people who would have forgotten to buy the book at all, or if it's just capturing sales that would have happened later when someone remembered to pick the book up, but I'd like to know! Also because planning releases gives me better control over when my revenue shows up. So, expect more warning about when things are coming out.
Get the Art Out There: Related to revenue showing up, I've let my art lie around too long. I'd like to get more things out there for it, like Best of Sketchbook Retrospective volumes and themed art books. You can only sell someone so many prints or originals before they run out of wallspace. I want to explore different ways to get my art into people's hands.
And yes, of course, I'm going to write! I have three books planned for next year: the gamelit, Surela's third and final novel, and Reese's short story collection (with concomitant Kickstarter). I'm going to leave it at that, though, because it's going to be a busy Mom year (probably one of the most momentous since Jaguar Child was born!) and everything is going to take backseat to getting that right. But I'm hoping to get partway into a fourth book.
To sum up, in 2025 I hope to chase down new ways of generating income while not failing to keep the old one (writing novels!) going. Some of those ideas will involve manifesting dreams I had always hoped for, like the fancy art books, and having books in the mall! So I'm excited about the new ways I might end up succeeding, or falling flat on my face, because I'm going to be learning and trying new things. And I feel like it's a good sign that I am excited about all this, rather than exhausted at the mere contemplation of it. Because, as I mentioned back in the beginning, I spent the first days of 2024 recovering from illness, and I am already feeling like 2025 will be the year I start rising, phoenix-like, from my slump. It shall be so!
Comments
Rebecca O'Neil
I love your self/business evaluation. It seems extremely useful for you as a business person and as an artist. And it’s inspiring for the rest of us.
pj wolf
Good luck
Liz
Absolutely would love art books!
