2024’s Writing Goals & Writing Goals For 2025

It’s time to look back at my writing goals for 2024, see if I met them, and then look ahead to my writing goals for 2025.

First up, I would very much like to thank everyone who bought one of my books or audiobooks this year. I am glad you enjoyed them! I would like to thank the narrators I worked with this year – CJ McCallister, Hollis McCarthy, Brad Wills, and Leanne Woodward – who actually did the work of creating amazing audiobooks. Additionally, I would also like to thank my podcast transcriptionist, my Excel bookkeeper, and my audiobook proof listener, (all three of whom wish to remain anonymous) who really helped out and took a lot of work off my plate this year so I could focus on writing.

2024, for me on a personal level, was a pretty good year. However, I admit it was a rough year for book sales – I was down about 12% overall. This came from two causes – 1.) a significant portion of the book-reading American public disappeared into doomscrolling their news apps from about July to November, and 2.) I scattered my attention too much.

I think next year I am going to focus up and do an Andomhaim book every other month like I did from, oh, 2013 to 2023 or so.

But all that is to come! Let us first look back and see if I met 2024’s writing goals.

1.) Write as many words as possible while trying to hit one million new words.

I did it! I am very pleased to report that I published one million words of new fiction in 2024, for the first time since 2020.

In 2021, I only published 971,000 words. I figure I had slipped once and would get it the next year.

In 2022, however, I only published 814,000 words. This happened due to a combination of a lot of travel and various Real Life stresses.

In 2023, I published 935,00 words – a significant improvement over the previous year, but I had Covid twice pretty close together in the early spring/summer and that really messed me up for a couple of months.

But in 2024, as of ORC-HOARD, I published 1,049,000 new words of fiction for the year! My ten 10k word days for 2024 probably helped with that a great deal.

I’m very happy about this since I tried to hit a million words in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but just couldn’t quite get there. Naturally I hope to repeat this feat in 2025.

2.) Start THE SHIELD WAR.

Did that as well, publishing SHIELD OF STORMS, SHIELD OF DARKNESS, and SHIELD OF CONQUEST all in 2024. And they’re even all in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills!

3.) Continue CLOAK MAGE.

Did that as well with CLOAK OF TITANS and CLOAK OF ILLUSION. Both books were interesting challenges to write, since TITANS burned up a lot of the ongoing subplots for the series, and ILLUSION had to work with a new game board, so to speak, since so much had changed in the previous book.

4.) Continue GHOST ARMOR.

Did that as well with GHOST IN THE VEILS and GHOST IN THE TOMBS, and both of them are in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

5.) Continue HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

I was able to do that as well with WIZARD-THIEF, HALF-ORC PALADIN, and ORC-HOARD, and both WIZARD-THIEF and HALF-ORC PALADIN are in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward.

6.) Continue SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE.

I renamed this series to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE since so many people were getting it confused with SEVENFOLD SWORD, but I did release STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: LEVELING in February. Both books in the series are in audio, as excellently narrated by CJ McCallister.

7.) New audiobooks for new books.

There’s only so much time, energy, and (especially) budget for audiobooks, so I decided that I was only going to do audiobooks in new series going forward, rather than trying to have old books recorded. I think this worked out pretty well, all told. That said, we did end up recording some of the older CLOAK MAGE audiobooks because I promised Hollis McCarthy a recording spot in April for GHOST IN THE VEILS, but I just couldn’t finish it in time, so we did CLOAK MAGE #7 ainstead, with #8 and #9 to come in 2025.

So I am pleased that I met all my writing goals for 2024. I’m especially pleased about the million words, since I had been trying to reach that in a year for the last four years, and I finally managed it in 2024. Very satisfying, let me tell you.

Now let’s look ahead to 2025.

Here’s what I would like to do in order of priority.

1.) Write as many words as possible, hopefully hitting one million new words of fiction.

As I mentioned above, it was enormously satisfying to hit a a million new words in a year after failing to do so since 2020. So I would like to do that again, if possible, though of course circumstances may be out of my control with that. Regardless, I definitely want to write as much as possible in 2025.

2.) Finish THE SHIELD WAR.

I am exactly halfway through THE SHIELD WAR, which puts me on book 4 of 6. I am planning to write a SHIELD WAR book every other month in 2025 until the series is complete.

3.) Finish GHOST ARMOR.

I am also exactly halfway through the GHOST ARMOR series, which puts me on book 4 of 5. Like with SHIELD WAR, I am planning to write a GHOST ARMOR book every other month until the series is complete.

4.) Continue CLOAK MAGE.

Once THE SHIELD WAR and GHOST ARMOR are complete, I plan to continue CLOAK MAGE, though I will probably start CLOAK OF WORLDS a little earlier as a secondary project.

I was originally planning for fifteen books in CLOAK MAGE, but I realized I have way too much story to fit into the remaining three books. So it’s going to be eighteen in total, with hopefully a suitably epic conclusion once I get to the eighteenth and final book.

5.) Continue HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

I also want to continue HALF-ELVEN THIEF. I originally planned for six books, but as with CLOAK MAGE, there’s too much story to fit into six, so it’s going to be nine instead.

6.) Conclude STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE.

As of this writing, I am 29,000 words into STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: REACTANT, which will be the third and very definitely final book in the series.

I would very much like to thank everyone who read the first two books!

STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE, I admit, didn’t perform as well as I had hoped. Like, I was just crunching some numbers to get ready for tax time, which also means looking at my bestselling books of 2024. I have 158 published novels, but the top ten in any given year are usually books I published in that year. Like, my top five bestselling books in 2024 are SHIELD OF STORMS, SHIELD OF DARKNESS, CLOAK OF TITANS, SHIELD OF CONQUEST, and GHOST IN THE VEILS. All five of them came out in 2024, so that’s no big surprise, right? Now, STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: LEVELING came out in February, so you would expect it to be in the top 10.

Nope.

Top 20? Still nope.

Top 30? Gotta keep going.

It was the 41st bestselling book of 2024. It came out in February, which meant it had abundant chances to place in the top 10, but it didn’t. The DRAGONSKULL and SEVENFOLD SWORD series both outsold it by a significant margin.

I think the problem is that I wanted to write a LitRPG book, but I ended up with a high-concept science fiction espionage thriller with some LitRPG elements in it. Maybe I should have written it so the protagonist Noah Carver had a harem of anime monster girls or something, that seems to be popular in LitRPG. The initial confusion with SEVENFOLD SWORD probably didn’t help matters, either.

I thought about abandoning it, but if I left it unfinished, it would nag at me forever like a pebble in my shoe. So I’ve been working on the third book as a secondary project, and will hopefully publish it around the summer or so. It will wrap up the story with no unfinished threads while hopefully providing a satisfactory ending, and that will be the definitive end of my foray into the world of LitRPG.

Then it will be time to turn to my next main focus.

7.) New epic fantasy series in the Andomhaim world.

I will start on this after THE SHIELD WAR is done, and then it will be my main focus for a while, with books coming ideally every other month.

I’m still working on the concept, but all I’ll say so far is that it will be set in Owyllain. Even back in SEVENFOLD SWORD we didn’t really see all that much of Owyllain, mainly the cities of Aenesium and Trojas, so there’s a lot of potential for story ideas there.

8.) New audiobooks as time, budget, and narrator availability allow.

My self-published audiobooks did a bit better in 2024 than they did in 2023, so I think I’m going to continue with focusing on new releases rather than trying to bring older series into audio. So I would like to do as many new releases in audio as possible, though of course this depends on budget, narrator availability, and a few other factors.

So those are my writing goals for 2025. Hopefully I shall have some excellent new books for you very soon!

“Go to now, ye that say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.”

-JM