A New Year, New Beginnings.

Jan 05, 2024 6:00 pm

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and is ready to start 2024 feeling energized and looking forward to great things. Or at least no major disasters.

In retrospect, my 2023 was pretty decent and a BIG improvement over 2022. I published two books, updated some paperbacks, created some colouring pages (more on that below), started working for Crystal Lake Entertainment, and got some of my writing mojo back in November with a flurry of WIPs being finished. I'll take that as a win.

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I have four things to talk about this month.

A new direct sales feature and store I'm testing out for Story Origin.
My writing/publishing schedule for this year.
My digital download colouring pages
A new podcast

My new Direct Store and Story Origin

At the end of December, I was asked to test out a new Story Origin feature in beta: direct sales pages. That's right, soon you'll be able to buy direct from Story Origin, similar to what Book Funnel has been doing. Since I've been looking for a way to get into direct sales, I jumped at the chance, and it's been good so far (they are using Lemon Squeezy as a pay platform).

But now I need your help, in the form of feedback. If you could spare a minute or two to check out some of my Story Origin landing pages, click the buttons, see whether it's easy to use, that sort of thing, and then give me your opinions on the setup. No need to buy anything (unless you want to). I'd also like some feedback on my Lemon Squeezy storefront, on whether it looks appealing.

Just check out the links below for the Story Origin pages.

Fairy Tales and Nightmares

Visions and Nightmares

Ghosts of the Sea Moon

Souls of the Dark Sea

Renegades of the Lost Sea

The Ghostly Tower

Shadow in Scarlet

And here is the Lemon Squeezy Store

(I'm still tweaking things here so any feedback is appreciated)

AFS Books and Designs

What to expect this year

I have five manuscripts to edit this year, with two definite planned publications, one hopeful publication and one maybe publication

The Heyward and Andersen series will (barring total disaster) have two more stories published this year. Stories 3 and 4, The Headless Corpse and Rivalry and Steam Monsters are on track to be edited and published, probably by summer. Story 5 hit a slight writing snag, but I will be working on finishing it as well for 2025. The other book I hope to have edited and published this year is my paranormal cozy mystery, looking toward an October date. I'd also like to finish the edits of Tales of the Norse Gods: Loki Saves the World, but not certain whether that will be done in time to be published this year or 2025. My historical fantasy, Masks and Shadows, is also in the editing queue, but that's unlikely to be published until 2025.

I published some colouring pages

If you like colouring pages I created a small digital download printable of mandalas and patterns that I uploaded to my Kofi shop in December. At some point, I'll add it to my Lemon Squeezy shop as well. You can check that out here.

Printable Colouring Pages

New Podcast!

I'm hosting an audio podcast for Crystal Lake Entertainment that will be launching in the latter half of January. It will be the Shadows and Ink podcast, featuring author interviews, writing discussions, book chats, and best of all, some true crime chats. I'll have more on that next month after the launch.

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