2019 Wrap-up

Whew. It's been a bit of a tumultuous year for my writing. A few downs, but quite a few more ups. So, let's get into the review of 2019.

After a long time coming (around a year and a half between submission and publication), my first real short story sale saw print in the voluminous book TRANSCENDENT by Transmundane Press. Now, to be sure, this wasn't a big payout, and turnout for it has been muted. But this is a good collection of short stories by a quality publisher. I am happy to report that I did see a brief, uptick in sales of my other works after it's release. So that was a good way to start the year, even if technically the book was released in 2018. (December 26th, to be precise.)

After that, I also got a bit busier here on the blog. I managed three posts in all of 2018, and this year I managed quite a few more. While it wasn't up to the level of once a week like I did several years ago, it's been nice to get somewhat back into the swing of things and let my thoughts out a bit. Whether the blog helps with sales or not has been up for debate since I started it, but it's not a bad idea regardless.

So, after the year started off well, and then slowly rolled into more of the same, I decided it was time to try something different. An author friend of mine had seen some success turning his stories into audiobooks, so I thought I would give it a try. First up was PATHS: Three Short Horror Stories. The expense wasn't too much, and the returns were decent, if not significant. Enough so that I decided to do the same for my other short work, Cenote.

Cenote blew up. While I honestly wasn't expecting much from it when I made the decision of who to narrate the story, I chose someone that was a Youtube book blogger with a following of over 50,000 people. And she told people when the book was available. In the months since its release, Cenote went from 9 ratings on Goodreads.com to 78! With all the accompanying sales that you would expect from that. Cenote is currently the only one of my works to come close to paying for itself. It's recouped the editing costs, and is over halfway to recouping audiobook costs. Things have slowed down, but sales still continue, and I'm hopeful that it'll be in the black next year.

There was one big let-down this year, which I wrote about last week so I won't go into too much here. But to put it simply, I didn't do my research on a publisher that accepted a short story I wrote for their anthology, and I lost first edition rights to a story I'm honestly pretty proud of, to an anthology I'm not excited to tell people about. 

Not a major year, by any means, one short story, and audiobook editions of older works. But that doesn't mean I've been idle. I've posted several new short stories here on the blog this year, and I've got a few different works in progress heading into 2020. I'll delve more into that next week though.

I was planning to put the 2019 wrap-up and plans for 2020 in one post, but this is getting a little long, so check back next time when I go over what I'm planning for next year and what you all have to look forward to from me.

In the meantime, thanks for reading and I'll catch you all later.

~ Shaun