I have spent some weeks in hospital with my youngest daughter which is never much fun, but they were somewhat less critical than in the previous 3 years, and there's never been a year of her life we didn't spend some time there. I did quadrupal my number of nights with zero sleep, which had previously stood at 1, arising from a ball at university and the studenting afterwards. The three this year resulted from stays of 27, 23, and 19 hours in the emergency room with Celyn.
This post follows up from similar posts at the same time in 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 I record a year of ups and less ups. I take a minute to do the sums and raid the scrapbook.
I've now had my Patreon for more than 2 years and it has been great fun so far. It's a platform that allows readers to support authors directly and encourages more exchange. I've done loads of chapter critques, sent out 100+ signed books as prizes, tuckerised a bunch of people. We have a Discord that gets a lot of chat, and each Patreon tier comes with perks, which can be anything from book plates, and free stories, to free signed books and writing consults. I currently have 118 patrons, up 5 from last year, so a definite slowdown there, but these are hard times for lots of people - many thanks!
The Book That Wouldn't Burn came out in 2023, opening the Library Trilogy trilogy (correct, the trilogy is called The Library Trilogy).
The book's performed well with multiple reprints in hardcover and it made the Goodreads Choice Awards for best fantasy. It's just passed 9,000 ratings, which probably makes it my bestselling book since one or all of the Ancestor trilogy.
April 2023 sees the release of book 2,
I can't share the cover yet, but here's a small detail!
Pre-order for the win (US or UK)!
10th anniversary editions of Emperor of Thorns are coming from The Broken Binding!
They're signed & numbered.
In the US you can order a leather-bound deluxe copy with internal art from original cover artist Jason Chan. An object of beauty!
Lies, damn lies, and statistics to follow:
Goodreads continues to bug out in major ways every week, but at least this year my stats have headed up rather than down. In fact, having gathered over 42,000 new ratings I've passed the half million mark!
The blog is bumping along around 1,000 hits a day - which isn't terrible - and passed 4.5 million in total in 2023.
The blog also had what was by far its biggest single day ever (a hair shy of 100,000 hits), after an AI-generated cover won the SPFBO cover contest after being misrepresent as the work of a human artist.
I'm still on Instagram. And have added Threads and Bluesky 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 2,200 followers this year, despite Mr Musk's continuing attempts to incinerate his 44 billion dollars.
Many thanks to all my readers for keeping me going! I hope you all have happy holidays and that 2024 is good to us all!
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