Did I meet 2021’s writing goals? Mostly!

So as the New Year approaches, it’s time to look back at the past year and see if I met my writing goals for 2021.

I’m pleased to say that that the answer is “mostly.” Let’s have a closer look! I don’t think I did as well as I did in 2020, but I still hit most of my writing goals.

1.) Finish DRAGONTIARNA.

I wanted to finish DRAGONTIARNA by the midpoint of 2021, and I did! DRAGONTIARNA: WARDEN came out in June, and it was quite well received. Thanks for reading the series, everyone!

2.) Finish GHOST NIGHT.

I had hoped to finish GHOST NIGHT in mid-2021, and while there were still some delays, I’m pleased to report that GHOST IN THE SUN came out in November. Another series is finished! I am once again grateful that so many people enjoyed the series.

3.) Continue CLOAK MAGE.

CLOAK OF ASHES came out in April 2020, and I was disappointed that I didn’t get back to CLOAK MAGE again in 2020. But I’m pleased to say that CLOAK OF BLADES came out this summer, continuing the series. If all goes well, CLOAK OF IRON will come out in February 2022. I also hope to actually do more than one CLOAK MAGE book in 2022.

4.) Write a million words of new fiction, preferably more.

Didn’t quite get there. I made it to 976,000 words of new fiction, which was close to one million, but not quite. So we missed this goal.

5.) Update paperbacks.

I wanted to update my paperback books so they have nicer interiors, and the covers are consistent with the ebooks. When I started doing paperbacks seven years ago (eight now), I used the default Createspace templates, which were good enough. But Createspace doesn’t exist any more, and I can now use Vellum to make much nicer interiors for the ebooks than what the standard Createspace templates allowed. Additionally, I’ve updated the covers for many of my ebooks, some of them several times, and I would like them to match the paperbacks.

I wanted to update the paperbacks of the FROSTBORN series by the end of 2021, with more as time permits. I am pleased to report that I did. All the FROSTBORN, and several of my other series, are now updated.

6.) Two hardbacks.

I wanted to have at least two of my books available in hardback. I did quite a bunch of them, and several of my series are now in hardback.

7.) Two more self-published audiobooks.

I wanted to have at least two more self-published audiobooks by the end of 2021, bringing me to a total for 46 audio titles. But I went a bit overboard, and combined with my Podium titles, I’m now at 54 audio titles.

I haven’t decided how to proceed with audio after that. Previously, I was happy to go exclusive with Audible/Amazon/Apple, but ACX has been struggling all year. Additionally, there are a lot more sales opportunities for audio outside of ACX than there were even two years ago. This was proven this year with a Chirp deal in November, which moved a lot of copies of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS and the rest of the series off Chirp.

8.) Healthier lifestyle and fitness.

I gained too much weight in 2020. So I needed some healthier lifestyle choices. I’m counting this as a writing goal because it’s a lot easier to write when I can sit comfortably.

People making ridiculous health resolutions for New Year’s and failing spectacularly is a cliché, so I set a more modest and achievable goal. If I am one pound lighter on January 1, 2022 than I am on January 1, 2021, I will count this goal as successfully achieved.

Sadly, it was not. I ended up 2 pounds heavier, but it could have been worse. If 2021 had ended a few months earlier, I would have been 15 pounds heavier than 2. So we’ll .

9.) Write a book about how to write a novel.

Did that!

The book was called STORYTELLING: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL, and it focused on story structure in novels. This way when people ask me for writing advice, I can point them to this book.

It was about 30,000 words long. That’s one of the nice things about self-publishing – you can write a book about a nonfiction topic that a publisher wouldn’t touch because it’s too short. Like, have you ever read a nonfiction book that could have covered the topic in half the pages, but the author obviously needed to pad the length? My LINUX COMMAND LINE guide is only 30,000 words, but it covers the topic and it’s a frequent bestseller in its category.

The book also included SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND. Before every chapter of IRON HAND, I had annotations explaining how I followed story structure in the specific chapter and why I made some of the storytelling choices that I did.

10.) Start a new series.

I did that as well! I published DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE in October, and DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT will be out in January.

11.) AVENGING FIRE

he idea came from regular reader William, who asked:

“I just read Share the Pain and I enjoyed it. It seems like a shame that it is left orphaned on Kindle with no link on your website. Anyway, I was curious if you have ever considered incorporating it into your greater body of fantasy novels by using it as the basis for a prequel to Cloak Games? It struck me early on that the year and the tone of the story would fit the tidbits about the last days of the US government and the elven invasion that were revealed in Last Judge. Also the familiar-sounding Irish names like Cormac.”

First, what was SHARE THE PAIN?

SHARE THE PAIN was originally a mystery novel I wrote fifteen or sixteen years ago. I self-published it back in 2011 when I started with self-publishing, but it never really took off because I didn’t know how to market it. (To be fair, when I started in 2011, I didn’t know how to market anything.) Eventually I made DEMONSOULED permafree, and that took off, so fantasy became my focus. SHARE THE PAIN just sort of sat there while I wrote other things, and my focus was on fantasy. It sold one or two copies a year, and that was that.

In answer to William’s question about CLOAK GAMES, I don’t really like doing prequels. It feels a bit like procrastinating instead of getting on with the main story, you know? Like, imagine that you have to mow the lawn, and you set out to do it, but first you decide to organize the contents of your garage, and the lawn remains unmowed. Writing prequels feels a bit like organizing the garage when the lawn needs mowing. I suppose some of my short stories are prequels, but I view those more like “bonus scenes” on the DVD, extra material that my newsletter subscribers get for free.

But one of the positive things to come out of 2020 (there were some!) was that I really upped my cover design skills. I started to wonder how SHARE THE PAIN would do if I renamed it and republished it with a new cover and modern formatting. It seemed like a worthwhile experiment, so I unpublished SHARE THE PAIN, renamed it AVENGING FIRE, and made the cover you can see in the graphic above. On February 1st, I republished it and sent it out to my newsletter.

How did it do?

I am pleased to report that in one month, AVENGING FIRE sold two and a half times as many copies as it did over the previous ten years. And it did well enough that I wrote a sequel called COVERING FIRE, and hopefully the third book CORRUPTING FIRE will come out in mid 2022.

Thanks again for reading! I hope my books proved enjoyable distractions in 2021. I hope they will do the same in 2022, though hopefully with less serious distractions!

-JM