I think my favorite time of the year is the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s a time for reflection, of looking at what you accomplished in the previous year and setting resolutions for the next one. In that spirit, here are some of the writing and publishing things I’d like to accomplish in 2015:
- Publish at least six new books
- Put out print editions of all of my books (except for short stories)
- Get to the point where at least 50% of my book sales are outside of Amazon
I’ve got a lot of projects on the back burner, and I’m sure that I’ll start lots of new ones in the coming year, but these are the ones I really want to focus on in 2015:
Heart of the Nebula — This is one that I definitely want to release this year. It’s the fourth novel in the Gaia Nova universe, a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and I’m really, really excited about it. For the past month or so, I’ve been in “finish this damn book mode” (which is why I haven’t blogged much), but I’m set to finish it by the end of this week and send it out to my first readers. You can definitely expect to see this one soon.
Sons of the Starfarers — The main reason I haven’t released Friends in Command (Book IV) yet is because my first readers told me it has some serious issues, which need to be fixed by adding another viewpoint character. It shouldn’t be too hard to do that, but before I do a major revision I always try to take a month or two off to work on other things so that I can come at the project with new eyes. I’ll pick up Friends in Command in January, and write the next one, Captives in Obscurity (Book V) immediately after.
Will I finish this series in 2015? I honestly don’t know. The books started as novellas, but each one has been a little longer than the last one, so by the end they’ll all probably end up as full novels. I could probably still do it if this was the only series I worked on all year, but I don’t want to limit myself in that way. Definitely, though, you can expect to see at least the next three books before the end of 2015.
The Sword Keeper — This unfinished fantasy novel has been sitting on my hard drive for about two years, and it’s time that I buckled down and put it out there. I tried to finish it last summer, and the main obstacle was that I had to do some serious world building. For a speculative fiction writer, that should be easy, right? Well … I’m kind of weird in that I tend to do most of my world building from the seat of my pants. But now that I’ve figured out what the holdup was, it shouldn’t be too hard to fix.
These are all books that I want to release before the end of 2015. I’m sure there will be others—perhaps even for story ideas that I haven’t come up with yet. It will be exciting to see how the year turns out!
