2020 Publishing Roundup

 

Okay, so 2020, aside from being a plague infested trash fire, was reasonably good for me writing wise. While my sales and overall profit took a significant dip compared to 2019, I had a couple more anthology publications, some free advertising courtesy of the Voice of Dog Podcast, and I finally published my long gestating Red Vixen prequel novel The Visitors.

Subtracting expenses, I made an overall profit of 222.11, which is a 1/3 drop from 2019's $333.15.

Notably, the only thing I self-published this year was The Visitors, which comprised approximately 30% of my total sales and 40% of my profit. As always it's a situation of "publish or perish" with my whatever my New Thing is being my biggest seller. Though that does prove I have a small but loyal fanbase that does look forward to my stuff. Notably my second biggest seller was The Complete Red Vixen Adventures which made about 20% of my overall profit, despite being several years old. It doesn't hurt that CRVA is also my thickest, and therefore most expensive, book. Also while The Rise of the Ring's sales dropped a lot, it still was in third place overall. Perhaps the most surprising drop was the two Prisoners books, which only sold two copies, despite being a significant part of my sales last year.

All told I sold 105 ebooks in 2020, compared to 155 last year, 2 paperbacks instead of 11 last year, 11,485 KENP pages read compared to 14,071, and 3 audiobooks compared to 8 in 2019. So much reduced, though I'm unsure if it's because of reader disinterest, or because of the general economic downturn due to COVID-19 reducing my readership's spending money. 

Things accomplished:

1. "With One Hand Tied Behind His Back" published in Fanged Fiction's erotic anthology Give Yourself a Hand.

2. "Gently Kept" published in Thurston Howl Publication's Howloween erotic horror anthology.

3. Self-published The Visitors.

4. "At Prayer" and "To Catch the Lightning Part One" and "Part Two" read by Khaki on his Voice of Dog podcast. 

5. Submitted "A Leopard Can't Change His Spots," a sequel to "Silence and Sword," for John Robey's The Reclamation Project: Year Two anthology.

5. Submitted "Snug and Tight" to Armoured Fox Press' Mamano Menagerie anthology.

Things in the Works:

1. Still working on "Marty 2: The Search for Pants" (working title!), my sequel to the RVA side story "I Fought the Claw, and the Claw Won." After sitting moribund for a while, I finally seem to have gained some momentum on this project, and I'm hoping to finish it and send it out to beta readers before the end of January.

2. Began work on an untitled Big Eyes, Small Mouth RPG supplement, to be published under their Open Gaming License. I intend this to be a mashup of the Red Vixen Adventures and For Your Safety universes, letting the Groupmind be the setting's big mystery, while the PC's fight space pirates, unscrupulous Kinis businessmammals, and help romantically tangled foxen.

This is going to be a big project, and I'm likely going to be running a small Kickstarter campaign once the manuscript is finished to pay for the illustrations, and so I can hire a proper copy editor and someone who knows typesetting better than I do to make sure it meets Dyskami Press's standards.

3. Untitled story for Thurston Howl's Furmiliar Spaces anthology. I'm signed up to provide a story for the "Beach" setting, though everything is still in the early planning stages.

4. At the encouragement of Thurston Howl, I submitted The Visitors and The Complete Red Vixen Adventures to The Furry Book Review for, er, a review. Hopefully they'll have something nice to say about them both.

Disappointments:

1. My Patreon. I lost several high value patrons, and I honestly can't blame them for ditching me, given I struggled to provide content for them. I'm still getting a few bucks a month, so I'm trying to keep it going, but it's never going to be a significant source of income.

2. Armoured Fox Press still hasn't completed editing on their Swordmasters anthology, where "To Catch the Lightning" awaits its formal debut. Given, well, 2020, I'll have to give Tarl some slack on this.

3. Also thanks to Covid, my hopes of having Tarl buy more of my paperbacks, especially The Visitors, to sell at AFP's table at the Fur, Eh? convention were dashed. Maybe I'll have better luck in 2021.

4. Reviews, or lack thereof. While The Furry Book Review has some kind words to say about the stories I had published in several anthologies, I've only gotten two reviews this year of my self-published works on Amazon. In particular I've received no reviews of The Visitors despite it being my best seller this year.

In Summary:

Overall, not my best year in terms of sales, but I've continued to publish on my own and have stories bought and published for anthologies. We'll see if I can improve things in 2021.