Whew. What a year! I got a few comments toward the beginning of the year of “you really need to focus on putting out your books” from people sending concern to me… well, I did. I notice I didn’t get any accolades from those same people. Oh well, can’t please the haters as we all know.
My original intention this year was to come out with books like this:
- The Stars Entwined
- Justified
- Colony Launch (this has gone through a few retitles)
- Von Monocle 2
- Alt Hero Novel
- Von Monocle 3
So 6 books on the year.
Plans changed as I decided to push Justified to a full trilogy written before I even release book 1. I’ve completed 2 of those books as of this writing and the 3rd is outlined and will begin in the next few days.
But further complicating the plans was comic books. I hadn’t intended to get heavily back into comics at the beginning of the year, but I found that this year MOST of my writing ended up being in comic book form. The other thing that happened was I wrote a quick novella for James Getnry to take a break, and that ended up becoming my hottest seller. It’s a business decision at the end of the day. So we ended up with a release schedule that looked rather different:
November: Make Science Fiction Fun Again
So I came out with 7 books instead of the planned 6, though two of them were short novellas so really it’s about the same output.
Writing wise, I’d intended on doing Von Monocle 3, Stars Entwined 2, Alt Hero 1 and 2. Instead I did Von Monocle 3, Sanctified, Alt-Hero 1, The Ember War Graphic Novel, Dynamite Thor Issue #1, Knight Training and Guard Training, and two other comics which have yet to see the light of day. I don’t count the short stories I put out to Patreon subscribers which just happen as “breaks”.
So again, while different than intended, the productivity might have actually exceeded my original ambitions. The Stars Entwined probably was the biggest disappointment, as it didn’t sell like I’d intended. I have a whole giant space opera planned there I’d love to get to but as it looks right now, I need to set it aside for the time being because Von Monocle and the comics keep selling so well. I’m hoping the Justified trilogy will do a bit better in that regard next year.
Flying Sparks had to be the biggest surprise success on the flip side. That did so well I really pushed my focus in the comics direction as I’ve mentioned. I’m working on a TON of content related to this as a consequence. Volume 2 will be crowdfunded early next year, we have The Meta-Man Special coming out soon, and we’re also working on volume 3.
Regardless, sales have been awesome, revenue wise I exceeded my expectations by 5x so I’ve moved from “This is a hobby” to “this is a serious business” over the course of the year. Also had a lot of great successes on selling short stories, of which I had 4 anthologies in the last couple of months put out more stories by me. Because of time considerations, I’ve switched to pretty much only writing Von Monocle tie-in shorts as of late — I figure if I submit those and they get rejected, I can always put out a Von Monocle short story collection when I get about 15 of them.
Von Monocle continues to sell. I’ve got a nice ad program and it’s working really nicely from what I’ve found, but won’t bore you with the details there. It’s been a great bonus that it keeps trucking along as a series. Book 2 is almost finished on the audiobook front, same with Knight Training.
In conclusion, despite the weird YouTubers turning on me in extremely bizarre fashion in the last couple months, 2018 has been a tremendous success. The Del Arroz train is still winning and we’re gonna win even bigger in 2019!
Make sure to grab my latest release!
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