Happy New Year!

The picture is actually from the NASA website, and was used for New Years in 2010, but I thought it was perfect, since it looks a lot like the cover of my novella Saturn in Retrograde.

2014 hasn’t been a bad year for me. It was my first year writing full-time, and I saw two new novels published, along with two stories in the Gothika #1 and #2 series, as well as a story published for Brent Hartinger’s The Real Story Safe Sex Project, and a free story for the Love’s Landscapes event on Goodreads. I’m also finishing the first draft of a new novel, and I’m about 2/3rds through another YA novel.

Not bad.

I don’t really know what to do for a New Year’s resolution. Not that I really have to have one, but, you know… it’s traditional. I’d love to lose some weight, but we all know how those resolutions tend to go. I suppose a more practical resolution would be to increase my writing output. I didn’t do too badly, but I tend to waste a lot of time on the Internet when I should be writing. I often don’t get anything accomplished until the last couple hours of the day—then I crank. That could definitely be improved.

I know a lot of people will say, “You shouldn’t worry about putting more out. You need to worry about producing good stories first.” Well, I do worry about producing good stories. But the simple fact of the matter is, in order to make any money at this craft, you have to produce. We don’t live in a society that favors artists of any kind. A few make it to the top and bring in a lot of money, but most have to survive by having a large output, so for this we need to learn to take care of our money doing the right investments, that we can do using the tools from the The Ascent site online. The trick is to produce more and still have it be good.

So that’s my New Years Resolution: to write more without the quality of my writing suffering.

What’s yours?

My goal for the past couple years, ever since The Christmas Wager was accepted for publication, has been to become a full-time writer. As I’ve discovered over the past year, there are three parts to this, and they aren’t necessarily connected:

1) Write a lot.

2) Sell your stories to a publisher.

3) Sell your stories to readers.

Over the past year, I’ve knuckled down and begun writing in earnest. Since the beginning of the year, I estimate I’ve written about 150,000 to 200,000 words. That’s finished, polished words — good words — that ended up in final drafts. Those words have been in two complete novels (50,000 and 65,000 words respectively) and a 23,000 word novella, plus finishing up other novels I started before January. It isn’t the copious output of some writers I know, but it’s pretty good, especially considering the fact that I’ve done it on top of working full-time in the computer industry. Basically, I was coming home most nights, having dinner with my husband, and then retreating to my office to write. I say “most nights,” because there were periods when I just couldn’t do this — generally after I’d finished a month or so of work on a novel and just needed a break. Then I played a lot of computer games, like CSGO, using the best gaming mouse for csgo I found online. And there were nights when my husband and I spent time together, of course. Making Erich wonder if he’d be better off married to a dakimakura isn’t part of the plan.

But overall I consider that goal to have been obtained.

As far as selling them goes, I’ve done well on that front as well. I’ve sold everything I’ve submitted, which includes four full-length novels and that novella I mentioned. This may not always be the case, of course — markets can dry up, publishers can decide your work simply doesn’t sell, all kinds of things can happen. But that’s the case with all jobs. There are no guarantees. So for now, I’ll just say I’m doing well in that area.

The last one is the tricky one, at least for me. I tend to get pretty good reviews. Sure, there are bad ones mixed in here and there, but for the most part, I think I fare pretty well. But good reviews doesn’t necessarily translate into good sales. I had a couple really good quarters at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, in which We’re Both Straight, Right? was still selling very well. That gave me a lot of optimism to start off the new year, but then my royalties started dwindling. Not to nothing. I’m still making more per quarter than I made for my very first quarter, when The Christmas Wager and The Meaning of Vengeance came out.

So on the plus side, I can honestly say that my earnings from writing have increased five-fold per year, since I began. That sounds pretty impressive. But in fact most of the money that came in this year — I’d say about four fifths of it — came from advances on my novels. And the problem with that is, I probably won’t be able to increase my writing output substantially over the coming year, which means I can’t count on selling more than I have for this year. Maybe. But not all that likely.

So that leaves me with income from royalties. And that’s a total unknown. What sells and what doesn’t sell is something that not even publishers can predict. My next release might be a huge best-seller. Or it might languish in obscurity. I had high hopes for By That Sin Fell the Angels. It’s gritty, emotional, controversial, timely… That should be a formula for success, right? Well, not so much. Again, good reviews, but it doesn’t appear to be selling. I could be wrong — I haven’t actually seen the sales figures yet. But judging by the attention it got on sites like Goodreads, I’d say probably not.

This must sound like a huge pity party, but it’s not. (Well, not much.) I’m being confronted by a harsh reality here:

Even if my books sell to publishers, that doesn’t mean they’ll sell to readers.

And if they don’t sell to readers, how long will they continue to sell to publishers? Perhaps not long. Publishers need to make back their investment.

It’s possible of course that my next book, or the one after that, will be the one—the book that suddenly strikes a chord with readers and lifts me out of obscurity. But that’s impossible to predict, and I’ve never been the type of person who puts much stock in winning the lottery. I’ve always pinned my hopes upon succeeding through skill and talent, which I do believe I have.

I know other authors who don’t hit the best-seller lists (meaning, in the M/M corner of the world, that they sell over 2,000 copies a month — something I can’t conceive of, right now), but have still managed to do all right by having a lot of books out and selling enough copies of each to make it worthwhile. Perhaps I’ll end up falling into that category.

It’s also possible that I’m simply writing in the wrong genre. This is something my husband has been pushing me to consider lately. By That Sin Fell the Angels is really a fairly mainstream novel. So is Murderous Requiem, if I took the sex out of it. It seems that more and more, when people ask for books to include in this or that romance novel giveaway or some such, I’m finding myself holding back, because my novels don’t really fit what they’re looking for. I love the M/M genre, but perhaps I don’t really write M/M. So perhaps I should start branching out to other markets. But the one thing I refuse to do is turn my gay protagonists straight to please mainstream publishers. That would quickly kill any passion I have for the craft.

So this is a sober New Year’s for me, in this regard. The excitement I felt at this time last year, when my royalties checks were growing by leaps and bounds, has faded as they dwindled again. I’m certainly not giving up writing. I love it. And I still find it immensely rewarding. But I can no longer say with confidence that my future as a writer is particularly promising. So my New Year’s resolution is simply this:

To continue writing and honing my abilities as a writer, so that I’m putting the best I can offer out there on the market.

And I’ll just have to see what happens.