Happy New Year one and all - This year I’ll have been a published writer for 2 years! There’s lots of plans for 2023 and lots of changes, but before I get into that I’m going to recap 2022.
2022 - What happened
I went into 2022 full of blind optimism and hope, we were coming to the end of serious Covid issues and I was starting the year as a full time author.
In 2022 I initially planned to publish 4 books - 2 novellas and 2 full length novels and in the end I published 2 novellas and 1 full length novel, so that’s not bad.
There’s an awful lot that didn’t go to plan last year in my personal life which impacted on my writing life. In January, after six months of pain & tests to find out what was causing it, I found out I needed to have my left hip replaced thanks to arthritis - although I’m young for this kind of surgery I found that I wasn’t too distressed by the thought of this, after all I was in so much pain and this would be a very effective solution. The surgery was scheduled for July.
Then in March my dad died suddenly from a heart attack and my world was turned upside down. It’s been ten months since he died and I still haven’t had the courage to listen to the last voice message he left me.
Dealing with someones estate is time consuming and grief is exhausting, far more so than I ever realised. With red tape and complications I found that tumbled on into the summer.
My fabulous daughter finally got her graduation ceremony, having graduated during the pandemic she’d been awarded her degree but not had the ceremony and I was incredibly proud to watch her cross the stage.
Then at the end of July I had my operation and quickly discovered that I’d spent so much time focussing on that I hadn’t given a moments thought to recovery. I didn’t know that whilst you’re pretty much able to do more normal things after 3 months that it actually takes a full 12 for your body to heel . So whilst I can walk, cycle (indoor bike) and drive, my flexibility isn’t as it was so putting on my socks is still a bit of a task.
I would think it goes without saying that all of the above was incredibly impactful on my writing year.
I had intended to dedicate a decent chunk of time to advertising - I have done this to some extent but nowhere near the scale that I had hoped.
Audio books were another casualty of my personal life and they were simply something I didn’t have the energy to do. I still try much want to get my books in this format, but I’m not going to make any commitments just yet.
Whilst I didn’t quite publish all the books I wanted to a lot of book things did happen. Jack In A Box and Sally In The Woods went through two new covers with me finally making the decision to work with GetCovers and this is probably (definitely) one of the best decisions I made, not only am I over the moon with the covers they’ve produced the cost is brilliant. In fact the package is so good it makes me wonder why I put myself through all of the cover stress up to that point.
Sales in the USA increased considerably and for the first time since publishing KU (Kindle Unlimited) made up approximately half of ally income.
Discarded the prequel novella was published in May and then What She Didn’t See Book 3 of the series in November, then finally Bloody Snow my winter novella in December.
I also wrote two books, book 4, Lies She Didn’t Tell and book 5 which is yet to be titled - but I’ll go into more detail on this later.
I started using TikTok more regularly - still work to be done there I think and I moved my newsletter to Substack to give me more flexibility.
So, that’s a brief round up of 2022 let’s talk about what’s next…
What’s new in 2023?
In contrast to 2022 I’m entering 2023 with a new day job, technically it doesn’t start until mid January, but I was offered and accepted the role in December. You might be wondering why, if I was living my best life as a full time author, well there are a couple of reasons.
I was made redundant in March 2021 and I was still recovering from long Covid, so my husband I made the decision that I would take the rest of that year to get well and focus on writing. But then I started having problems with my hip and as I mentioned earlier had the operation, so knowing that I was going to be out of action for most of the year we decided I wouldn’t look for work until I was fighting fit once more.
Going back to a day job was always part of the plan and in many ways I’ve been blessed to have had an extra year to write full time. What does this mean for my books and my writing career? Honestly it doesn’t change very much in the big picture. I was writing before when I had a day job and I’ll be writing again with a day job.
Time management is going to be more important than it has been, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing, it was always amazing how much I could get written in a lunch break when time was precious. It also means that I’ll have a bigger advertising budget which can only be a good thing.
Writing Plans in 2023
You might think that I’ll be scaling back my publishing ambitions in 2023, but you’d be mistaken, in fact I have pretty lofty goals.
Assuming all goes to plan there’ll be there new full length Rowan McFarlane novels in 2023 and in addition to those I’m hoping to launch a new series, the main character, Gwen is like a female Jack Reacher, book 1 is already written and I’m excited to share her with you later in 2023
Getting four books out is a lot of rewriting and editing and technical behind the scenes stuff, of those four books, 3 are already written and in various stages of readiness. New writing this year will be book 6 of the Rowan McFarlane series, which I’ve already started and book 2 in the Gwen series.
I mentioned earlier that audiobooks had been a casualty of 2022, and as much as I’d love to get this off my ‘to do’ pad this year, I’m not 100% sure I can, all I say is watch this space.
Possible titles for book 5 are:
Dead At The Start
They Pay The Price
Gift From The Dead
Lessons From The Grave
If you’ve got any strong feelings on these please let me know, because honestly, titles are hard.
Finally I want to say thank you for all your support in 2022, here’s to 2023 being everything you want it to be and if you haven’t bought my books yet, then there’s no time like the present so I’ve dropped all the links below