Year in Review

2015 was good.

It started badly because I was sick for about a month. That made me late in my self-imposed deadlines, but they were only self-imposed.

I published Dark Deeds in February and Scattered Seeds in September.

Book 3 for A Changed World is outlined and I plan a fall release.

The first book in the new series, Transmutation, is in the first rewrite and will go to the 2nd reader in about a week. I plan to submit this story to Kindle Scout in the spring. You will be hearing more about this along the way.

As an experiment, I pulled Lethal Season and Scattered Seeds out of wide distribution and put them in the KDP Select program. Every month since has seen an increase in pages read. That translates into increased income for me, but more importantly, it is more people reading my books. I've sold 60 books and have almost 6,000 Pages-read for the year, not counting December (which looks very good so far!).

In comparison, I have some books in wide distribution in Smashwords and Draft2Digital. I have sold 1 book through Smashwords for the whole year. I loaded books into D2D in September and have had only 1 sale there so far.

My sales and reads might not seem remarkable, but they are an improvement over last year. I am getting a smidge more revenue and that's exciting. Not ready to quit the day job, yet, but it is a step on the way. As a new author it is so difficult to get found. KDP Select seems to be helping with that.

The garden gave me an excellent harvest. My new raised beds seem to be working well. There were a few fumbles and failures, but that is to be expected. The weather has been so warm in my part of the country that I am still harvesting goodies. I decided to try some fall veggies this year and they are thriving despite the excess rain and lack of sun.

All in all a good year for me. Looking forward to the challenges and victories of 2016.