Mark Lawrence: A Year in Numbers

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

A Year in Numbers - 15

At 15, this blog is now older than Prince Jorg Ancrath for the majority of my debut novel!

Although I spent 23 years as a research scientist I never spent longer than 10 years at any one job, so I guess that makes “authoring” my longest employment.

Anyway, onto the traditional accounting:

2025 turned out to be a pretty challenging year!

Celyn went into hospital 4 or 5 times this year, which is about average, but the most recent visit was very scary and the doctors were talking about “hours left”. Earlier in the year my father had a similarly close brush in hospital. Recently an old friend of mine died unexpectedly. And Wobble suddenly took ill and died.

On a more positive note, because Celyn (now 21) gets much better care these days, I’ve been able to start travelling and have been to book events in Zwolle, Leeds, Edinburgh, Brighton, Belfast, and Bristol.

This post follows similar posts from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 and earlier years where I record the ups and downs of the year.

I’ve now had my Patreon for more than four years. The Discord is very active, and I’ve done many critiques for top-tier patrons.

Tier 3+ patrons can download seven unpublished books, plus short stories and novellas.

The Book That Held Her Heart came out in 2024, concluding The Library Trilogy.

Short Story Collections

My novel-related short story collections are now all available in paper form — many in hardcover.

The Broken Empire: Road Brothers
The Red Queen’s War: The Red Queen’s Ward
Book of the Ancestor: Tales of Abeth
The Library Trilogy: Missing Pages

Coming in March 2025

Book one of my next trilogy, The Academy of Kindness: Daughter of Crows .

If you were to pre-order it, I would stand in your debt!

Lies, damn lies, and statistics to follow:

On the face of it, the blog has really taken off this year - getting a million hits in 12 months. I don't belive that for a moment though. Looking more closely, many of these hits are on pages about competitions I ran 5 or 10 years ago. I suspect bots scraping for content to feed AI, or something similar. It's sad because I now have no real idea how many people read what I put here.

I'm still on Instagram. And have added Threads and Bluesky (which has really taken off) to the failing Pintrest and Tumblr (I'm easy enough to find on them and too lazy to put links).

And finally, as ever, our favourite cesspit of witch hunts and fake news: Twitter, where I continue my crawl forward with an extra 1,100 followers this year. Are any of them real ... no idea 😅