Shitty Casual

It's that time again. This year put almost everyone through the wringer, I think. I was a whiny wah-wah for a while but I got my shit together and changed my goals for this publishing thing.

What kinda year was it? Welllllllllllllll

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Me me me me

I saw the writing on the wall mid-year and recalibrated my estimated yearly earnings from $10k to $7k. Assuming something completely crazy doesn't happen the last day of the year (One year I sold around 200 books on 12/31 for reasons still unknown to me and THAT WAS AWESOME), I made about $7,500 this year before taxes and expenses. My royalties increased by $500 this year, which was less than I expected for my backlist and amount published (2 novels, 2 novellas, 5 shorts, and a bundle).

My bestselling book is my newest novel, which made $440 over the last 6 months. I pulled $1,000 on my best erotica bundle, and I had 3 books cross the $1,000 lifetime threshold which for me is a nice milestone. A while back I set extremely modest "earn out" thresholds of $2k for novels, $1k for novellas and $200 for shorts. I've had some bombs (one book only made $53 even though my superfans lost their minds over it) but generally speaking, the novellas and shorts usually hit those targets in about 2 years if they sell at all.

After really struggling with my SFF projects, and beating myself up about not fully crawling out of the romance/erotica pit, I've decided to embrace the creative wisdom I am where I need to be.

I am where I need to be. I will get there. In the meantime, I've drastically overhauled my short/mid term goals.

• Writing is officially a hobby now. It is not a business, it is a thing that accidentally makes money sometimes, and I will make it as stress-free as possible.
• Consequently, I am scaling back admin to basically zilch.
• My genre is now AO1 (audience of one, aka books for myself). I write what my heart desires and accept it's what I need to be working on at the moment no matter how weird or gooey or difficult to cat it might be
• My goal is to finish up the ghosts hanging around (languishing WIPs) and build up a backlog of unpublished books to trickle out once or twice a year.

This is very different from goal list I set last year or even six months ago, but right now the focus is writing consistently and enjoying myself. I adopted this mindset in mid-November. So far so good.