2019: The Year Ahead
It seems that around the new year, everyone’s got a blog post about the year behind and the year ahead. I swear I’m not doing this post to just jump on the bandwagon!
That being said, let’s talk about the year behind and the year ahead!
2018 was an interesting year. It saw me write New York Heat, my most ambitious project. It saw me launch my young adult pen name, Dylan James, with my debut young adult novel, Gay Love and Other Fairy Tales, which instantly became my bestselling book of all time. It saw me continue and grow with the Deep Desires Podcast, start up and grow with the Sex For Money Podcast, and continue to grow with my publishing company, Deep Desires Press.
2019 is going to see me refocusing quite a bit.
Namely:
I will strive to write more. I’ve spoken before about my ambitious writing plans — now to follow through with them! I’ve also got other pen names that need books written for them. I wrote about a quarter of a million words last year (which is down by about 100,000 from the year before) — maybe 2019 will be the year I break the 400,000 word level?
I’m investing more time and energy into gay young adult novels to see if my success was a one-off or if there is more to be done there. I’m partway through Ashton’s Fabulous Gay Agenda, about a gay teen who has an after-school radio show. After that, I’ve got a modern western featuring two gay teens on opposing ranches. Fingers crossed I’ll get them both done this year.
I’m discontinuing the Sex For Money Podcast. It really just wasn’t working out. It was often the last thing on my mind in the month, which led to missing a few months. And I just wasn’t getting the listens I needed to make it worth my while. Thinking about it, though, I realized that writers looking for publishing advice would hit up Google, not Apple Podcasts. So with discontinuing the podcast, I will subsequently return to the occasional SFM blog post.
The Deep Desires Podcast will get it’s own spin off! I will be hosting Deep Desires After Dark, a podcast featuring explicit excerpts from Deep Desires books, read by the authors.
I’m going to start blogging a little more regularly! My sister got me the 300 Writing Prompts journal for Christmas. Instead of writing in the journal, I’ll turn it into semi-regular blog posts. And, as a reminder, I blog twice a month over at Oh Get a Grip, which has recently undergone a refit and is now more erotica focussed.
And my big goal for 2019 is to focus more on marketing and promotion. For so long my goal has been to write books and publish them, then move on to the next one. As I get better at delegating tasks over at Deep Desires Press and start to free up more and more of my time, I plan to use that time to promote my writing and see if I can boost sales a bit.
So, there you have it. 2018 in a nutshell and all of my 2019 goals.
